SEO Mistakes Beginners Make

There are many mistakes you can make when it comes to SEO. The following are the worst of the worst – when you are building a website, you MUST avoid these mistakes associated with fundamental SEO, or risk disaster:

Going hog wild with Flash or JavaScript. Google can only crawl images which are accompanied by text that tells the search engine what they are  Google can also crawl JavaScript, but not all browsers will support it. Limit your dependency on these methods so you don’t end up with a user unfriendly site.

Errors with title tags. Two common screw-ups: using the same title tag for all pages (duplication), OR ignoring the opportunity to optimize them for the page’s keywords. Title tags normally what shows on the SERPS as a clickable link, so make them say what you want to appear.

Robots.txt errors. You can use this to disallow Google from crawling certain things – but do it wrong and your entire site will suffer. If you are having indexing issues, this is often a culprit. Ensure that you have a crawlable sitemap for best indexing results.

Ignorance of internal linking potential. You should optimize your internal links just as you do your external ones. If your home page has PageRank, you can be passing PageRank to internal pages! Take every advantage to sculpt your internal rank and send juice to your lower pages for maximum benefit.

Hiring an SEO firm that is ‘out of the box’, spouts ‘formulas’ and doesn’t tell you exactly what they can and can’t deliver. If you use an SEO firm that deals in black hat tactics, you might get fast, high rankings and a lot of links right off the bat. Later, however, they will have your money and you will be out fo luck when Google penalizes your site for their crooked link buying and keyword stuffing.

Duplicate content. Automated content generation, along with posting the same article in too many places or only posting PLR articles is going to hurt your site! You really need to invest time and money on fresh, original content for your site.

Cloaking. Black hat warning!! Search engines are coming down hard on webmasters who show one page to the search engine for crawling, but redirect visitors to another page. This is often done alongside keyword stuffing which will show super optimized pages to the search engine and less aggressive pages to the consumer. This is a red flag to search engines that you are doing something ‘evil’.

Spamming. Don’t spam! Ever! It will kill your reputation, Everyone hates a spammer.