8 Common SEO Mistakes

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From time to time in this blog, I share tips on how to optimize your website for the search engines. Today, I’d like to talk about some common SEO mistakes and how you can avoid making them.

#1 – You optimized for common, popular words

It may be tempting to optimize your website for the most common, popular words. But the problem with this strategy is that you will be competing with millions of other websites for these words, and the sites that show up on page one are usually large corporate sites; the ones that have big budgets. A better strategy will be to focus on long-tail keyphrases, so that you won’t be competing with as many sites and you’ll have a better chance of ranking on page one of Google.

#2 – Every title tag has the same keyword phrase – your company name

You are doing your business a disservice if the title tags on your website don’t include keywords people use to find your product or service. Even if your company name includes a keyword that reflects what your business is, the title tag gives you the opportunity to customize each page. The search engines want to see unique content.

#3 – URL of your website has no keywords

This “mistake” isn’t as bad as some of the others. But if you can put keywords into your URL, you will enhance your optimization efforts.

#4 – Your website’s heading is an image – no text

The search engine spiders cannot “read” images, so if you’re going to have an image for a header, use an “alt tag” so you can include keywords that will get read.

#5 – Your design/SEO firm “did” SEO and you are #1 on Google

This is probably the most common SEO myth. If you are ranking #1 on Google, congratulations! But you better enjoy the ride because it’s not going to last unless you continually update your site with new content. Every day new websites come onto the Internet and they will be jockeying for position and gunning for your #1 ranking. SEO is a constant process. Use social media to complement your efforts.

#6 – Your SEO firm promised you’d be in thousands of search engines

If an SEO firm promises to submit your website to thousands of search engines, run, don’t walk away! There is no reason to waste your money on this process. As long as your website can be found on Google, you’ve won the battle.

#7 – You did SEO after your website was built

This one just puzzles me. It seems a lot of people think it’s ok to do SEO after building your pages. But do you go on a trip before packing? It makes much more sense if you can optimize your site as you’re developing content for it.

#8 – Your website was built entirely in flash

You might as well put an invisible shield up between you and the search engines because they don’t see you. You can use some flash elements but make sure you have text on your website that the search engines can read – and include headers with keywords in them as well.

Do you know of any other mistakes? Please let me know! I’ll share them in another article.

If you have made any of these SEO mistakes, I can help you fix them. Just send me an email: gloria@gloriarand.com.