4 Common SEO mistakes to avoid

[ava]

Hi everyone,
Just wanted to share some information that I think may be helpful to people who are new to seo. There are 4 things you need to avoid when doing search engine optimization.
1.Selecting the wrong keywords
2.Leaving the title tag empty
3.Not keeping an updated site with fresh content
4.Selecting poor backlinks instead of quality backlinks.
When creating your website try to avoid these pitfalls and you should be on your way to optimizing your website properly for Google and other search engines.

[Mickm]

Nice list, I'm sure many will add to it.

Here's my top 4 (well.. top 4 from a site I just finished engineering)

1. Lack of mod rewrite
2. Lack of robots
3. Lack of sitemap & site map
4.a. Lack of good anchor text
4.b. Lack of relevance
4.c. Lack of variants
(hope I'm not being too greedy)

[anuj291]

thnx for the share

[robertstr]

Thanks for sharing your experience in doing SEO. what cool and useful information you gave! I totally agree with you. Here are the most important things I think we should avoid
1. Having poor content
2. Building poor backlinks
3. Designing pretty appearence
4. Lack of variations
If we have a pretty website we will get indexed traffic for SEO

[inman]

Originally Posted by Mickm

Nice list, I'm sure many will add to it.

Here's my top 4 (well.. top 4 from a site I just finished engineering)

1. Lack of mod rewrite
2. Lack of robots
3. Lack of sitemap & site map
4.a. Lack of good anchor text
4.b. Lack of relevance
4.c. Lack of variants
(hope I'm not being too greedy)

What do you mean by lack of variants?

[J.Cole]

Originally Posted by inman

What do you mean by lack of variants?

Would like to know too. Does it mean we need to have few variants of our targetted keyword? For example, I'm targetting "tomatoes", so while building backlinks, my anchors should have variants like "delicious tomatoes","organic tomatoes","juicy tomatoes" ?

[TheCren]

How on Earth does one select the wrong keywords? Do you mean they were going for keywords that were too general/competitive? If so, I definitely agree - that's a pretty common mistake. I'd also insert "bad" anchor text in there somewhere around #1 or #2.

[Jenie0109]

lack of patience!

[Super Affiliate Spy]

No targeting action keywords
Oversaturation of keywords when optimizing.
Not using LSI when optimizing
Not giving "alt" descriptions

[gadget_man]

One further and important is to write your domain in one way and stick to it. For example the following all go to the same website but are all seen as different addressed so choose one and stick to it:

http://www.mysite.com
http://mysite.com
http://www.mysite.com/
http://mysite.com/

[dataprovier]

I do have some more:
1. If for some reason your website is not working for a time when crawler visits your website then this would surely affect your ranking.
2. Dont do spamming of any kind other wise this would effect your earnings.

[wezzley]

I feel that robots / sitemap is not as important as some people let on. provided you interlink your site properly.

[Intrepreneur]

The biggest of all for me is..

Not optimizing pages for more than one keyword.. Optimize for 50 if you can.

Therfore you'll end up with number one rankings for the same page, for many different traffic generating keywords.

[Frances Norah S]

Originally Posted by inman

What do you mean by lack of variants?

I think what it means by lack of variants is the keywords that you want to rank for. For example if you want to rank for the term 'golf tips', you should also try to get backlinks for the term 'tips on golf', 'golfing tips' and so on. Don't just try to rank for one keyword phrase. Google may see it as unnatural backlinks.

[zoobie]

Jenie0109, I agree with you.. good competitive terms and make you a good deal of money one you are on the top... you can drive traffic various ways rather than just SEO.
so if you don't have top 10 ranking yet, do something else and have some guys work for your SEO rather than doing yourself. It is TOO time consuming if you are going to do that, you are not going to anywhere.

[Zeus66]

I would add to the variants discussion that you don't want to just come up with variants of your main keyword off the top of your head. There's no point in ranking for variations that nobody searches for. It's important to research the variants and pick only the ones that do get searched for at least a few times every day.

This is not to be confused with LSI, which I do think matters for on-page SEO. You do want to sprinkle in related words - regardless of their search value - in order to give Google a better idea of the theme of your page.

John

[mr.schutz]

Thanks for posting. All of the above are true!

[robertstr]

Originally Posted by inman

What do you mean by lack of variants?

Very nice question you have. we need to have tons of variants but the content is still preserved.

[Kenneth Harvell]

A lot of good answers..

[maco]

Thanks for the info.

[mayonis]

I like this thread.It gave me a lot of fresh ideas.Thank you all for sharing the info.

[stevereel]

I'd like to add, put your keyword in your url.

[SurviveUnemployment]

Bad keyword weight is a killer, too. Too heavy and it looks like you're spamming. Too light and you don't show up.

By the way, WebCEO helps you do all of the above and more. It's in my sig. Try it. You'll see why the big boys use it.

[linkisking]

how bout making a flash based website.i see this a lot.i dont think googlebot can read these.

[WareTime]

These are things that work, not to avoid

1. Keyword in the domain

2. Short urls are in especially withTwitter and the like. For Wordpress domain/postid is a nice permalink. If you can't put enough info in your page for the search engine to tell what the page is about a spammy-hyphenated-keyword-laden-url-is-not-going-to-help-you.

3. Reusing old domains is good

4. Registering for more than one year is good

[Bcrewse1]

Lot's of great stuff in this thread! Thanks for the info..and don't forget....use an alt tag for any pics you have on your site and stick your keyword in there! =)

[MBeshr]

great post
thanks for sharing

thanks

[ases61]

Originally Posted by WareTime

These are things that work, not to avoid

1. Keyword in the domain

2. Short urls are in especially withTwitter and the like. For Wordpress domain/postid is a nice permalink. If you can't put enough info in your page for the search engine to tell what the page is about a spammy-hyphenated-keyword-laden-url-is-not-going-to-help-you.

3. Reusing old domains is good

4. Registering for more than one year is good

Yes, I agree him. Keyword domain is very important.

If u select good domain, u will start 100 meter bottom

[AlbertF]

I agree with the number one the most. Most webmasters target the wrong keywords. I recommend using one of these tools, 5 Keyword Researching Tools That I Use | Moola Days and use it to find keywords that are best matched and easily challenged for you.

[Jenie0109]

we all say ' Content is king'.. Therefore, we need lots of fresshhyy contents that make sense

[Filipino Chat Room]

This is a very informative one. Thanks for the tips.