The 10 SEO Mistakes That Will Kill Your Site

Don’t make simple , avoidable mistakes that can cripple your SEO efforts. Here is a list of ten pitfalls to avoid when optimizing your site.

1. Coding can hurt you! When you are designing and coding your website (or paying someone else to do it) you MUST keep in mind that it is important not to use JavaScript or other spider-illegible coding. Often legible code will yield the exact same thing, so why make life hard on the spiders?

2. Your choice of keywords is extremely important. Decide what keyword phrases mean the most to your particular service or product, then strive to include them on your site. Think about the way people search, and focus on a small group of the most important keywords they will actually be searching for, instead of every conceivable keyword combination in the universe.

3. Your navigation structure is also very important. Don‘t have long confusing urls. The best urls include relevant keywords with few slashes or dynamic characters. If your pages and names are in line with the content, the spiders will appreciate it and so will your visitors.

4. Don’t think title tags don’t matter. Using just one title tag throughout your whole site won’t work. Each page needs a unique title tag which explains what the page is about. These titles show up in the Search Engine Results, and can be a huge encouragement to help convince visitors to click your result.

5. Watch out for your splash pages. You don’t want to leave your home page without focus and bare. If you decide to keep a splash page, be sure to add relevant content and make sure you have loads of navigation to keep the search engines busily spidering through your site.

6. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking all search engines are the same. Each search engine has their own plan, and you may rank better with some than with others. Of course, the top search engines bring the most traffic so concentrate on Google, MSN and Yahoo, with some attention to local, vertical and visual search engines particular to your niche.

7. Simply trading links can’t help you as much as good backlinks. Getting links from related (key point) sites is good, but you should always be on the look out for good quality links that don‘t require reciprocation. Trading links with other webmasters is not necessarily hurting you, but it is NOT good to trade links with sites which are completely unrelated.

8. Excess graphics, or unutilized graphics. Your site should be balanced between text and graphics. This is key both to search engine visibility and conversions. If you have a lot of flash, or too many images without text to back them up, you are asking for trouble.

9. Remember to come through. Keep your promise, and give the consumer what they need. If you can’t deliver, you have done all the previous work for nothing. Ensure that your site is set up to provide whatever it is that you are trying to rank for. You must give the visitor what they are hoping to find, or they will decide your site is useless, no matter how nice it is..

10. Don’t get caught up in thinking that SEO is everything – SEO is important, but should be one part of a multifaceted, balanced online marketing plan.