Top 5 Common SEO Mistakes

Although you don't need to be an expert on search engine optimization to get your pages ranking well in the search engines, there are many common mistakes to avoid when optimizing your webpages. Making any of them can cause the search engines like Google to penalize your site, or worse ban them. Here are common SEO mistakes that should be avoided.

1. Keyword Stuffing

While it is important to place your keywords in your content, placing your keywords too many times can be seen as spamming by the search engines which can result in your site being penalized or banned from search listings. As a rule of thumb, be sure to write your content so that it is easily readable by humans. There is much debate about keyword density but the recommended percentage is around 2% or about two times per hundred keywords. While you can include more occurrences, doing so may cause your content not to be easily readable.

2. Not Optimizing Anchor Text

One of the most common mistakes that people make is using the words "Click Here" as an anchor text linking back to their webpage. A way to gain high quality backlinks is by writing articles and submitting them to directories with a link back to your webpage. When linking back to your webpage, always use relevant keywords as the anchor text to tell the search engines what your page is about.

3. Using Code That Is Not Search Engine Friendly

When building a website, it is important to properly plan ahead of time and not to build the site with coding that is not search engine friendly. For example, spiders cannot effectively read some parts of javascript coding.

While Flash based websites certainly look visually appealing to the visitor, search engines are not able to read the content. The same also applies with images. Search engines can read the alt tags of images but are not able to read the actual content contained within the images.

4. Not Optimizing On Page Factors

On page optimization refers to factors that relate to your webpage that you have complete control over. This includes optimizing your title with relevant keywords as well as writing a relevant meta description to entice searchers to click through to your page. Other on page factors that can be used for optimal search engine optimization is to include your keywords in the content, header tags, image alt tags, and in the URL.

5. Getting Links From Link Farms

You might think that getting any type of link to your website is beneficial but there are links from some sites that will actually hurt your rankings. Link farms are pages with the sole purpose of linking to other pages and rarely provide any useful content.

Most of these sites are often blacklisted from the search engines and provide absolutely no value. It's often not good to trade links with other sites that are completely unrelated as these webmasters tend to trade too many links with other unrelated sites. What might result is that your link credibility will go down and turn into wasted efforts.

These are very common SEO mistakes that are often made by beginners first starting their website or even for those who simply don't know any better. While you do not need to be an SEO expert, you can easily avoid these common SEO mistakes and boost your search engine rankings.