7 Search Engine Optimization Sins

If you own a website you are probably aiming to get a good ranking in search engines such as Google and Yahoo. There are many guides to help you improve your SEO, but it also helps to understand what you should avoid doing. Read on to find out about the 7 deadly search engine optimization sins.

Sin 1 - Keyword Ignorance

One of the most common mistakes that people make when building a website is to completely disregard keyword research. The result of this is that you could end up building a website around keywords that nobody actually searches on or you could build a site using the most competitive keywords on the internet and have to wait forever to see any results.

At a minimum you should pay a quick visit to the free Google Adwords Keyword tool and type in a few keyword ideas. When you look at the results try to ensure that your main keywords have a decent number of average searches each month. Also type your keywords into Google and make sure that you feel confident about beating the competition and getting your site on to the first page of results.

Sin 2 - Keyword Spamming & Hidden Text

Mentioning your keywords hundreds of times throughout your web page or making big lists of keywords with a font color that is the same as the background color is not going to help your search engine rank. Neither is adding keywords that have nothing to do with the content of your page.

Remember that you should concentrate on making your content good for your visitors, not just the search engines. You should ensure that you sprinkle your keywords throughout the text on your page and mention them in the TITLE tag and the headings on your page. But, it is important not to overdo this. If it doesn't sound right when you read it back, you have probably gone too far.

Sin 3 - Only Optimizing the Home Page

Many people will spend all their time concentrating on optimizing the home page. The home page is often the most important page on your website with the most visitors, but that doesn't mean you should neglect the rest of your website.

Choose different keywords for each page on your website and for each blog post you make. This will enable you to get many times more traffic than you would if you only concentrated on the home page. Even if you choose less popular, less competitive keywords this can have a dramatic impact on your traffic if you have lots of optimized pages on your site.

Sin 4 - Not knowing your Competition

Before you go ahead and optimize a page on your website for a particular keyword phrase you should take a look at the websites that you are competing with.

Enter your keywords into Google without the quotes and take a look at the web pages on the first two pages of results. Most people don't go past page 2 of the results when they are searching, so you need to be able to compete with the sites on the first two pages.

Are these sites big multinational companies? Do they have high page ranks or thousands of backlinks? If there are authority sites or popular sites in the results it doesn't necessarily mean that you cannot compete with them, but it does makes sense to understand how much work it is going to be and whether or not you have the resources and the capability of doing his.

Sin 5 - Bad Linking

It pays to be careful about who you link to. Linking to "bad neighborhoods" i.e. sites that have been penalized by the search engines could have a detrimental effect on your own ranking. Similarly, selling text links on your website is also looked upon as bad by Google.

Another thing to be careful of is the total number of links you have on a single web page. The Google webmaster guidelines state that you shouldn't have more than 100 links on a single web page.

Sin 6 - Poor Navigation

Having a site with a poor navigation structure or using exclusively javascript menus could result in your website not getting fully indexed by the search engines.

Search engines can't read javascript, so be sure that if you do have a javascript menu, supplement it with a text based menu. Aim to ensure that the search engines and visitors to your website can quickly and easily navigate to all the pages on your site. An easy way to do this is to generate an XML or HTML site map. There are many free site map generators available on the internet.

Sin 7 - Forgetting about Off Site Optimization

Finally, one of the things that you cannot afford to forget about is off site optimization. This means getting lots of backlinks from related, good quality websites and using your keywords and variations of your keywords in the anchor text. Building backlinks is the best way to increase your position in the search engine ranks and you should aim to grow your backlinks steadily over time.