Top 10 SEO Mistakes 1) Targeting the wrong keywords 2) Ignoring the Title tag 3) A Flash website without a html alternative 4) JavaScript Menus 5) Lack of consistency and maintenance 6) Concentrating too much on meta tags 7) Using only Images for Headings 8) Ignoring URLs 9) Backlink spamming 10) Lack of keywords in the content ALL THE BEST
This are the most common mistake that is available on the web. one of the most important mistake I think is lack of keywords in the content.
and Broken links, rebuking the visitors with too much ads, popwindows, bad ergonomy, flashy colors, spelling mistakes....
You are right. These mistakes could harm rankings. Backlink spamming means you are getting hundreds of backlinks on daily basis.
1Targetting the wrong keywords This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide†does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship†keyword, while “dating advice†works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site. 2Ignoring the Title tag Leaving the <title> tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your <title> tag shows in the search results as your page title. 3A Flash website without a html alternative Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it. 4JavaScript Menus Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable. 5Lack of consistency and maintenance Our friend Rob from Blackwood Productions often encounters clients, who believe that once you optimize a site, it is done foreve. If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines. 6Concentrating too much on meta tags A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don't except to rank well only because of this. 7Using only Images for Headings Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet or consider this approach: http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text. 8Ignoring URLs Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs. 9Backlink spamming It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks. Here are some more information on The Importance of Backlinks 10Lack of keywords in the content Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.
These are all brilliant tips, and I've done my best with them all, and I just can't break into where I want to be.
Yet again there are many sites that actually fail to meet to any of the above and still rank high for many and I mean many keywords. Lots of factors in ranking - One main factor is also domain age.
For #7, I also suggest making use of your h1 tag. It should only appear once on any page, at the top of the content, and can be styled exactly how you want with CSS. But then you can also use an image right below (or beside) it, but make sure the alt text is relevant to the keywords used in your h1 tag, title tag, and meta description tag. The keywords used in all those areas should be similar, but not necessarily identical. You don't want to get busted for keyword stuffing.
Incidentally, do you know how to get your image to rank at the top of a Google image search for a given keyword? Answer: the keyword needs to appear in the same <td> tag as your image, and should link to the image. Here's an example: <table><tr><td align="center"> <img src="path-to.image" alt="keywords" /><br /> <a href="path-to.image" title="keywords">keywords</a> </td></tr></table> I know you might think this is weird, but it really works.
miles2go, great job on explicating the initial mistakes, spot on... chiendent is on as well especially about broken links and too ads which are such a turn off on some sites of those top mistakes, from what i read the most important one to correct is the Title tag, very important for seo, one of the top 3 or 4, make up a good title tag and description for each of the main pages in your site. i do think that Bing gives particular importance to the keywords in the url, and i'll be darned if i havent regretted not having a slightly different url, but that's life.... backlink spamming is a good no-no to point out as people ask in the forums all the time how many backlinks can i add per day/week/month and not suffer from - i'm not sure of an actual number/limit but apparently flags will be raised if you get too many too soon....
I'll have to disagree with you about two points: 3) A Flash website without a html alternative First Google keeps on improving their flash indexing and it seems to be a good one, so flash sites with the right structure will get's indexed and ranks well. 7) Using only Images for Headings Images are not readable by any SE but you can simply use the ALT tags and type your heading keywords within this tag beside some CSS for heading to make it big However, your list is quite good and really helpful.. Thanks for sharing.