Top 10 Webmaster SEO Mistakes And How to Avoid Them - Part 1 of 2

One of the biggest misconceptions with new webmasters is that you need to hire an "expert" in SEO to achieve high rankings. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not rocket science. You don't need a degree or a doctorate in IT or marketing to apply effective SEO techniques. There are, however, several rookie mistakes that are made by many new webmasters. This guide focuses on these mistakes and explains how to avoid them.

Mistake #1 - Poor Keyword Analysis (or non-Analysis)

The Mistake: You've found a niche for a website that fills a void that has been missing online for years. You build your website and fill it with all kinds of great unique content and finally launch it to the world! Traffic starts off slow... and stays that way for several months and you're left perplexed on why people aren't finding your site.

The Reality: You've launched your website too soon, without doing proper keyword analysis. Keyword analysis is the process of analyzing the keywords search engine users have been searching on the most that best matches your niche. The goal is to target keywords that get the most searches and have the lightest amount of competition. Before you launch your website (or even write content), proper keyword analysis is a must! It's suggested you open an account with Wordtracker and begin your keyword campaign today. Word Tracker will allow you to view the number of times a keyword was searched in any of the major search engines and will provide reports on the competitiveness of that keyword. With some clever keyword analysis you can broaden the reach of your website by zeroing in on those niche and non-competitive keywords.

Mistake #2 - Keyword Stuffing

The Mistake: As an overzealous newbie you've read various threads and guides that state the importance of highly-targeted keywords appearing on your WebPages. In an attempt to gain high-rankings for a specific keyword phrase you place them several dozen times throughout your text. By the time your done with your aggressive keyword stuffing you're left with a page that has 40%+ density of your keywords that the search engines are going to love. Your proudly pat yourself on the back and give a good "atta boy!" for a job well done!

The Reality: Congratulations! You've just created a non-sensical page and applied the black hat marketing technique known as keyword stuffing all at the same time! Keyword stuffing, for those who may not be aware, occurs when a web page's meta tags and content are loaded with a particular keyword or keyword phrase in a repetitious manner. Not only does this practice result in pages that are non-readable to humans, it also raises a red-flag to the search engines. Keyword stuffing may get you higher Search Engine Results Placement (SERPs) in the short term, but it will only gain your site a bad reputation with users in the long term. It may even get your site penalized or (even worse) banned from the search engines.

Mistake #3 - Identical Meta Data For Eevery Page

The Mistake: You create your home page and fill your META data tags with some nice keywords and a very well worded description that is also search engine friendly. You're home page serves as a template, so you just propagate the same content from the header into every new page you implement without ever altering the content of the META tags to correspond to the content of the new pages.

The Reality: By applying the same META information to every page on your website, you are doing yourself a great disservice! Despite what some people think, META tags and META descriptions are still important! For every page on your website you should have a new set of META keywords and new META descriptions that are relevant to the content of the new page. By doing this you are optimizing for potentially MORE hits to your website as users who search for information may land on these pages as a result of your META updates.

Mistake #4 - Using Images in Place of Text

The Mistake: Wow! Those images your web designer just created sure do look pretty! Much prettier than plain old text!

The Reality: Yes, they do look pretty and I'm sure your web designer did a fine job on them. They've also managed to loose you potential customers at the same time, so make sure to send them a nice thank you letter. The reality is that images in place of text is a terrible practice and one that you really need to avoid. The content of your website plays a very hefty part in determining how well your website will place in SERPS. Spiders are smart, but they are not able to read the text contained in images. By placing text in images you may loose out on your pages being indexed and miss out on some keyword counts. This will loose you potential traffic, not to mention that images load much slower than pure text (and you'll probably have to pay your web deisgner every time you have a text change need). You'll find that you can achieve an almost identical appearance and reduce load times by applying style sheets. Web designers are good at what they do, but often their reliance on flashy images can be a huge detriment to your website.

Mistake #5 - Inappropriate URL Anchor Text

The Mistake: Trying to grab the attention of a user on your site you use a nice spiffy bold-faced 24point font with the words "CLICK HERE!!!" (and for added affect you use the blink style). Yep... that will get their attention all right!

The Reality: Besides the fact that you've just gained some NEGATIVE attention (talk about tacky) you've also managed to create a 100% irrelevant link by providing garbage anchor text! Internal linking is important for proper SEO, and providing relevant anchor text makes all the difference. Instead of using anchor text that reads "Click here" or "click me", provide relevant text to that describes the destination page of the link. For example, when linking to an internal customer support page you want to avoid setting your anchor text as "Click here for customer support". A proper set-up would be "Please visit our customer support page if you have any questions." In the second example you've created relevant anchor text for the link and increased the readability at the same time. Search engines spiders will love you for it!

Continue on to Top 10 Webmaster Mistakes Part 2!

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