Top 10 Blunders in Search Engine Optimization

What are some common Blunders in Search Engine Optimization?
Photo by CC user seoplanter on Flickr

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a vital tool to ensure your website can get found by the search engines and, consequently, by your audience. Because SEO is now reasonably well known, a lot of people believe that they can do it themselves. This is a big mistake, because doing something wrong can seriously damage your website overall. It is always best to leave things to a professional search engine optimization agency instead. Let’s take a look at the top 10 blunders DIY SEO’ers tend to make.

1. Using Frames

Frames are a big no-no! There is no logical reason for you to use frames because all it will do is confuse the search engine bots. You can adjust the content or write scripts so that it can work with frames, but that is really a waste of energy. Its day has come and gone on the internet …. stop using frames!

2. Using Flash

Flash may be visually cool, it slows your site down and a slow site doesn’t get ranked. Yes, thanks to Flash, keywords can appear in beautiful ways, but there is no visible text on the page, which is what the bots look for. Plus, many users purposefully switch flash off.

3. Skimping on Titles

You need to make sure that you have a strong and relevant keyword in your title pages. You may feel like using “about-us” for your About Us page, but millions of others have already done that. Come up with something else.

4. Overstuffing Titles

Your title should never be longer than 70 characters. If the pages have limited content, you should use less. And place a comma between every phrase.

5. Burying Text

In many cases, the design becomes so important that people forget about text. Text should always be visible and at the top.

6. Using Graphics for Page Headers

Don’t use graphic headers, simple as. Text headers are much better, and they should be surrounded by strategic keywords.

7. Using the Wrong Words

One word keywords are loved by many because they get so much traffic. In reality, however, the traffic is very unlikely to be relevant. Hence, choose longer keywords or even keyword sentences.

8. Forgetting to Link Build

Link building is a very old SEO tactic, but one that still works, and very well too. Make sure that you focus on it, therefore.

9. Keyword Stuffing

This is the biggest blunder of all, as it could leave your page penalized. In the worst case scenario, you could get permanently banned! Keyword stuffing means that you use your chosen keyword so often that it must attract the attention of the search engine bots, but for all the wrong reasons.

10. Using Long URLs

Last but not least, if you have long URLs, you confuse everything, not in the least the search engine spiders. Avoid them, making your URLs as short as possible instead.

By avoiding these 10 big blunders in search engine optimization, you should already have much better rankings. However, this will probably leave you with the question about what to do instead. What you should do is hire a professional who can manage your SEO for you.