SEO TIPS: Untangling the Puzzle of SEO

Seo is not as easy as it seems and it isn’t something you should try to undertake being unaware of how it properly works. Mistakes are inevitable in any undertaking, but the key is to minimize them as much as possible. There are many mistakes you can make when it comes to SEO. There is more to it all than slapping a few keywords into some copy or grabbing a few links here and there. There is an actual process and science to strong SEO practices and they are ever evolving as the web changes.

As we said, mistakes will happen, but some are obviously far worse than others. If you know what they are, they are easier to avoid. The following are the worst of the worst mistakes you can make when you are building a website. it is non-negotiable that you MUST avoid these mistakes associated with fundamental SEO, or risk disaster that you will have a lot of trouble ever digging out from under on your own.

Going hog wild with Flash or JavaScript is an obvious mistake. Google can only crawl images which are accompanied by text that tells the search engine what they are, so you have to avoid those that aren’t Google friendly. Google bot is getting some tweaks to get better, but it just isn’t quite there yet.  Google can also crawl JavaScript, but not all browsers will support it so that isn’t a good option either. Limit your dependency on these methods so you don’t end up with a user unfriendly site. This is cardinal sin number one.

The next big mistake is 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. This is a mistake that is so easy to avoid but made over and over again. Fixing it isn’t really all that hard, but it is a major waste of time and you lose ground in the SERPs just because you started off wrong in the first place. Title tags normally show on the SERPS as a clickable link, so make them say what you want to appear. Take the time to do it right!

Now, a lesser understood and known mistake are Robots.txt errors. You can use this to disallow Google from crawling certain things. That sounds like a good thing and it is when used properly. The problem is, if you do it wrong your entire site will suffer and that is nothing to take lightly. If you are having indexing issues, this is often a culprit, so check for it first. Ensure that you have a crawlable sitemap for best indexing results. We cannot stress enough how important a properly constructed sitemap is. Think of it as the spinal column of your site.

Few things are worse that ignorance of internal linking potential. You should optimize your internal links just as you do your external ones. You may think it is a waste of time, but when you do this correctly you will see the difference right away. 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. To not do this is to just give away positions in the SERPs and that is contrary to everything SEO is about.