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Search engine optimization (SEO) is a very effective way to increase your website rankings in search results. The higher the rankings the more traffic you would get from the search engines. In a previous post I blogged about the top 10 search engine optimization techniques which would help you to understand the basics of SEO. Many people start optimizing their websites for search engines without knowing the basics of SEO. Also, the search engines are regularly updating their protocols for ranking websites, so you need to well-informed with the latest tips and techniques of SEO. What was good for SEO 2-3 years ago might not good for today, so you have to constantly update your website accordingly. I have seen many people to use wrong SEO techniques on their websites or uses techniques that have no value at current time. It is required to learn the common mistakes that many do with their sites while trying to optimize their websites for SEO. I have talked about 10 common mistakes that people do often while optimizing their websites for search engines. I hope you will learn from these mistakes and update your websites with proper SEO techniques.

1. Wrong keyword usages: Spend some time in choosing the right keywords for your website. Targeting the wrong keywords can break your SEO campaign. First try to find some suitable keywords for your website. If you have a new website try to target the keywords which are not highly competitive yet gets decent amount of search traffic. Targeting a highly competitive keyword initially may not help you unless you have a well established website. In any case try to find keywords that are suitable for your website. Do not target very general keywords as they might not bring you any traffic at all. Select only relevant and specific keywords that will bring you targeted traffic. Targeting unrelated yet highly searched keywords would not help you to reach anywhere. Once you have selected a set of keywords, try to use them in your text wherever it makes sense. You may even bold or highlight them to stand out. Also, do not think too much about keyword density. You should target your keywords in page titles, description meta tags, and in the texts, but do not overdo it. Make your website for your audiences, not for SEO tools or search engines. Also never stuff keywords in your page footer as hidden text or lightly colored text – search engines might consider them as pure spam.

2. Ignoring the title tag: Title tag is one of the most important factors for your search engine optimization campaign. You should never ever leave those tags empty or with the same element on every page. The title tags for each page should be different and relevant to the topics to avoid duplicate content issues. Try to use some keywords in your title tags and make them short, to the point, and relevant to your text. Also these tags will appear in your search results as clickable links, so making it appropriate to the topic is highly essential for SEO.

3. Improper navigation structure: One of the important parts of a website is its navigation structure. You have to work on to make your website to have a proper site structure, consistent and smooth navigation, proper link text, etc. These are good both for your readers and the search engine spiders. Try not to use the elements that are not accessible by the search engine spiders. Refrain from making an all flash based website. It might look awesome to your readers, but search engines cannot read flash elements properly therefore they cannot index it. If you still want to use flash navigations, then you should also provide an html version of your website to the search engines. Search engines also cannot read JavaScript or Ajax navigation and elements. So if you still want to use them make sure you submit a proper sitemap to the search engines (or put the links in a noscript tag) so that they can be crawlable.

Also, use should put a proper robots.txt file for the search engines and make sure the file was correctly made, otherwise search engines may not crawl your site. Do not use too many variables and session IDs in your URLs. Many people use images instead of text for headings or menus. Images certainly look better than the text links, but you should remember that search engine spiders cannot read the images. If you are still using images then add the alt tags to your images with the proper keywords. You should also use the heading tags (especially h1 and h2 tags) in your website as these tags are important for your search engine optimization.

4. Inconsistent content and maintenance: Do not write content for the search engines, but write for your readers. If the readers find useful information in your content then they would link your website in various resources all over the web. Never give up on creating great content because the content is the single most important thing in your website by which you can increase the number of repeating visitors. Inconsistent and dull content never retain a user to your website and your readers will never come back. Always concentrate on writing keyword-rich contents that not only your readers will like but also loved by the search engines. No matter what niche your website is in you can always write feature rich and linkable content to your website. Also try to update your website as frequently as you can. Try to write at least one new article every week or even better if you could update every day. That way search engines would find new items frequently and they would visit more regularly to index your content.

When writing contents do not use smart titles like the way print media uses them because search bots are not very clever. Try to use simple, clear, concise, and descriptive titles that people understand clearly and they are also good for the search engines. Do not forget to use capitalization when required, use proper grammar, and make your content consistent. These will help you to increase your rankings for your targeted keywords and phrases.

Another thing often people does that they think once you optimize your site for search engines you do not need to do it again, but the truth is SEO is an ongoing process. If you want to be successful you need to keep optimizing your site with the latest trends. Search engines keep changing their algorithms to rank website and you need to keep a close eye on them and also the competition with your rival websites. Search engine ranking protocols or SERPs are not open to the public but look at the latest trends closely and you would learn a lot.

Do not try to spread your content over several domains or websites. Try to concentrate on a single website at a time. There are times when creating sub-domains and addition domains requires to grow your business, but unnecessary do not create multiple domains to spread your content over them. Also, do not forget to create a custom 404 page for your website which will make your website more professional.

5. Wrong use of meta tags: Some people still think that stuffing the meta tags with keywords would help them to rank their websites better, but the truth is current search engines put very little or no weight on the meta tags to rank a website. Do not concentrate too much on the meta tags. You can always create your meta keywords or descriptions but do not expect to get any help from them to rank your website well. Among the meta tags only description tag has some value left as they appear in your search engine results as non clickable characters. That is why you should create separate description tags for each of your page. Make them clear, concise and simple. Do not leave the description tags empty or same for all the pages as they would look inconsistent to your search results. Providing separate meta descriptions for each of your pages also help you in avoiding duplicate content issues. Also, do not stuff the meta tags with several keywords, but few should be sufficient. I have seen several websites stuffed with 10-20 keywords in their meta tags, that makes no sense and you should avoid that.

6. URL structure: Many people ignore the URL structures in their website while it is an important factor for your website. You should avoid the dynamic URLs at any cost as they are not very search engine friendly. Having too much variables and query strings in your URLs does not help you at all. Search engines do not like the dynamic URLs and they find it difficult to translate query strings in the dynamic URLs. Use ‘mod-rewrite’ to convert your dynamic URLs into static URLs. Providing static URLs and permanent links are the important steps for your website to rank higher.

Try to add relevant keywords in your URLs which would give you additional advantages over your competitors. URLs with no keywords in them are not good for SEO. Though it is possible to rank higher without any keywords in your URL but it always gives you an upper hand. MSN and Yahoo search engines value keywords in URLs and even Google gives some weight, so there is actually no excuse for not having any keyword-rich URL.

7. Link spamming: Backlinks are very important factor for your website as search engines finds your contents through them and the more backlinks to your website you have the better. One way links are more valuable than the reciprocal links. Sometimes people misunderstand the importance of backlinks and they start plastering their links all over the internet – blog comments, guestbooks, foruns, etc. This is not a good backlinking strategy and search engines might perceive these as spams. Many try to buy links, use link farms, newsgroup spam, etc to increase their links, but these inappropriate procedures might do more harm than any help and search engines might ban your website if you use any unethical procedure to increase your link. You should try to increase your backlinks but never resort to any blackhat procedure to increase your links.

8. Wrong link building strategy: Building your links throughout the internet is important for your website, but you should not build up an unequal link profile for your website. Knowing links are important many webmasters start trading links with every other website they find on the net. This is not a good strategy and bad for SEO. Exchanging links with other websites are not bad, but if all of your inbound links are from only link trades then that is not going to help you much. One-way links are most important and you can only get one-way link if you have great content on your website, so stress on that. Reciprocal links are not bad if done with relevant quality websites and they should be only a fraction of your total links. Also try to grow your links gradually with time and do not rush into building thousands of links overnight as that would be considered as link spamming by the search engines and they might ban your from search engine results. Also, when exchanging links with other websites do not use same anchor text on all of your links, but use a set of anchor texts –that way your link profile would look like natural.

Also, do not waste your time submitting your website URLs to all the search engines. Search engines will crawl your website once they find your link on another web site. So try to build your links accordingly. Search engine submission was a good practice few years ago and now it is outdated.

9. Duplicate content: Never ever post contents that are copied from other websites. Always write unique contents for your website. Posting duplicate content or copy pasting contents from other website will not help you for SEO and your website might receive duplicate content penalty from search engines. You can use contents from other websites for your inspiration or you can quote 1-2 sentences from other websites for references but never try to copy other’s articles and post as yours. This is not good for your readers and search engines never give any weight to the duplicate posts. Try writing unique and relevant articles for your website and both your readers and the search engines love you for that.

Also, do not allow both ‘yourdomain.com’ and ‘www.yourdomain.com’ to resolve to your homepage. Search engines consider ‘www.yourdomain.com’ and ‘yourdomain.com’ as two separate pages and that means search engines will find that both the pages have same content which is not good for SEO. Use simple ‘mod-rewrite’ technique to redirect one page to another – that would resolve the duplicate content problem. Similarly do not point your homepage with a URL like ‘www.yourdomain.com/index.html’ – that’s also a separate page for search engines and they would consider these pages like duplicate contents, so you should avoid that.

10. Obsession over website rankings: Many people get obsessed over their website rankings. Checking your website rankings every hour or everyday does not going to change anything, so better spend your time improving your website or writing unique contents rather than watching the ups and downs in the SERPs. Also do not consume too much into Google PageRank. What you see in the little green toolbar is several months old and it does not really affect your search engine rankings. So there is no point spending time over it. Also nowadays PageRank is more about crawl frequency and depth of your website rather than your actual search engine rankings. Though some consider Google PageRank as a measure to the quality of a website, in most cases it is not true.

Try to avoid these simple SEO mistakes and your website will rank better in SERPs. That’s it for today folks! See you soon!