Most Common SEO mistakes

So you have decided to implement SEO. Now comes the question - What are the biggest pitfalls you should avoid? Who are the biggest SEO culprits? To answer this question we scanned the web, read website SEO reviews and asked SEO experts. Based on our findings, listed below are the most common SEO mistakes that you should avoid.

Bad, unreadable web page titles

When users see you web page listed in the search results, the page title is the first thing that they see. So do search engine crawlers / spiders when they record your website. The page title is a great way to tell a search engine about your web page. The tile also plays a significant role in ranking. The key is to place your keywords in the title, but not go overboard. Spiders really consider only the first 60 characters of the page title. Additionally, they are capable of identifying cases of keyword stuffing (see below).

Keyword Spamming and Stuffing

This term signifies that you are overusing your keywords. Every page of your website does not need to have the same keywords in the title, description and other meta tags. Analyze your website and focus on a specific group of keywords for each web page. Also your keywords don’t need to appear 50 times on each page. Let your keywords flow naturally with the content.

Unmarked, badly marked images

So you have great banners and pictures on your website. Guess what, if you don’t describe them in your IMG - ALT html tags, the search engine spiders cannot see them. Use the ALT attribute to describe the image content, preferably with keywords.

Linking to Bad Sites

A link is like a recommendation or vote. And if you link to bad sites that are banned or full of spam, your website might get penalized. This shouldn’t be a problem if you are adding links manually. It is fairly easy to identify bad websites. However, you should be watchful if you are a part of an automated, reciprocal linking program.

Poor Grammar and Spelling

Major search engines are now starting to incorporate spelling and grammar checkers in their ranking algorithms. This makes sense because it reflects badly on the search engine if they point their users to a web page which is full of spelling and grammar errors. It is also an indication that the content quality of that web page is sub-standard. Regardless of search engines, your web page should always be checked for spelling and grammar mistakes because this is a major no-no for human visitors.