Top 10 SEO Mistakes and how to avoid them

Good content and SEO should go hand in hand. But often the reverse happens. Many sites I have seen has either one of the two. Either they are filled up with damn good content or they are heavily optimized for SEO.

Lets try to debunk a few SEO related mistakes which may seem ordinary but could be easily missed by the best among us.

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Mistake 1 – Not having resources allocated to SEO

Even if you are making a site on a church theme or a NGO organization, you need SEO. SEO is not only for business website or for people with budget to spare on their we activities. They are also for sites which are started just for fun or just for addressing a small need. In today’s world if you need any, mind you any traffic from the Search Engine then you need SEO practices embedded in your website worksheet.

Mistake 2 – Thinking a SEO Specialist will get the work done for you

The second most common mistake is to believe that hiring a SEO experts and giving them their quoted figure will do the work for you. Wrong.

SEO practices start from the vision and mission of the site. Where does the site sees itself in a distant timeline and how it wants to achieve that. These forms the basic criteria to start a SEO campaign for a site. So isn’t it obvious that it would definitely require the owner of the site to have participation in the whole thing?

Mistake 3 – Sticking with wrong Keywords (major ones)

You must have met hundreds of self claimed SEO gurus and experts. They are the ones responsible for making the whole SEO stuff look a bit jazzy and sophisticated. While the truth is otherwise.

SEO concepts are pretty basic and to get the SEO done right and keep doing it is pretty hard and time consuming. So forget the artificial jump to top 10 SERPs from Google and Yahoo search engine within a short time. Because you will get that only for low search keywords which have low number of indexed pages. Making it big in the SERPs for heavily used keywords would take time, maybe months of focused approach.

So remember, just to get into the top ten result, do not stick with wrong keywords. You would be harming the SEO campaign of yours unknowingly.

Mistake 4 – Not making a Keyword hierarchy chart

Once you have figured out which al keywords you need to focus on, you should not make an attempt to just keep posting topics on any of them randomly.

Some keyword have h primary status meaning they are more important and should appear more frequently compare to the others. You should keep this in mind. Better way is to divide your keywords in two basket. One called primary which contains keywords with high importance associated to your domain. The other basket called Secondary where the low importance keywords are placed. Now you know where to put you energy and focus on.

Mistake 5 – Proper URL / Permalink Structure

URL or the Permanent Link Structure of your site forms an important SEO tools. Most of the Web Site and blog building software have customization options to alter your permalink structure. However, often many people avoid this important part.

Make sure you set a proper permalink which help you boost your SEO ranking and also looks friendly to the readers. Setting session based variables or post numbers as your permalinks looks bad on the eyes and are difficult for crawlers to pick up compare to sensible ones.

Avoid permalinks like

• www.smartblogtips.com/post=123
• www.smartblogtips.com/28-12-2008/9-53-pm
• www.smartblogtips.com/article12345.html

Use a consistent and good permalink structure based on your preferences

• www.smartblogtips.com/top-10-seo-mistakes
• www.smartblogtips.com/archives/08/02/top-10-seo-mistakes
• www.smartblogtips.com/seo/tips/top-10-seo-mistakes
• www.smartblogtips.com/2008/top-10-seo-mistakes

Mistake 6 – Bad Site Description / Tagline

Site URL and Heading (also called the tagline) is very important in terms of SEO. You should at least have the following thing ready for your self for each and every site of yours.

• Rich Domain name – You domain name should be relevant to your niche. try to have a short, easy to remember domain name with at least one keyword in it. Achieving all three of this simultaneously is pretty hard. So obviously you have to make some tradeoff.
• Good Tagline / Site Header – A site header or the tagline is a sole sentence description of your site in the best way possible. As with the Domain Name, try to keep this one also short, effective / easy to remember and stuff with at least two to three keywords in it.

Mistake 7 – Not Utilizing Meta Tags and ALT Tags

If you think META tags are out or they can be automated then you are wrong. META tags once used to hold a lot of importance for Search Engine Crawlers. Then pretty soon everyone started to using them for their benefits and they lost their importance / relevance.

So now nobody seems to be using them. At most what people do is install some SEO plug-in and think they can automate the task.

Mind you, META tags still hold importance and you would be surprise what using META tags can do to your SEO campaign. Although I would admit that this can take time than it used to be. But hey I am not the one telling people that SEO campaigns are a two week affair.

Make sure you have Meta Tags for the TITLE, PAGE/POST DESCRIPTION, KEYWORDS and ATL tags for the IMAGES and FLASH/OTHER OBJECTS on your Web Pages.

Mistake 8 – Stuffing too many Keywords into your text

Stuffing too many keywords on your site will be a slow suicide attempt. It will hush away the blog readers because its pretty hard to read a paragraph which looks like a dictionary.

Moreover, its also very stupid of you to think that you can fool the crawlers of the search engines by this cheap trick. The crawlers that have been searching all over the web, indexing and ranking sites. If that would have been the case, then everybody would have been a SEO Expert.

Example: Make money online is about how to make make money online using bloggers make quick cash. Earning online is about earning from home and earning on weekends. Make money blogs are very good with quick money making tips and get rich quick strategies. You see I am trying to fool the SEARCH ENGINES but it would have  adverse effect on me in the long term.

Mistake 9 – Misrepresentation of Site Structure to the Search Engines

Even after having a optimized pages in you site, your SEO campaign might be futile exercise if your site do not gel together as a whole. The most important way to do this is via

• Logical Orientation of your Site – The content of your site should flow in a logical way. Also try to categorize similar stuff together. This mundane task is near automated in WordPress. It is very easy to organize similar post under same categories and tags. Similar functions would be available on other Website Packages.
• Your Page Navigation and Category and Tag Navigation for Posts should be easily accessible from all pages. Avoid Javascript menus as they tend to confuse the Search Engines.
• Updated Sitemap – A sitemap tell your site structure to the Search Engines. Make sure it is updated on a weekly basis. If you are using WordPress, then you can automate this task using Google XML Sitemap Plug-in. Just activate it and set the options.

Mistake 10 – Not following Google Yahoo and other Search Engine Guidelines

Finally, before you begin spending your precious time, make sure you read the Guidelines of at least Google, Yahoo and Live if not other Search Engines. You might unknowingly violate one of them while focusing too much on your SEO.

Here are the most important guideline which you must read through quickly before you begin your SEO campaign

• Google Webmaster
• Google
• Yahoo
• Live Search

You can contact me for SEO Campaigns, Web Strategy, Paid Consulting or free advices on small issues by dropping a mail to smartblogtips@gmail.com

Share your SEO tips via comments to me and other readers. Have a nice day..!!

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