Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential in getting traffic driven to your site. When optimizing your site, there are several common mistakes that too many people tend to make. It is important to become aware of what these mistakes are, so that you don’t make them too!
Search engine spiders have trouble reading flash and cannot read javascript at all. Despite this, there are many people who use flash or javascript for the majority of their site. Now maybe it’s just me, but I would personally want my site to be something that spiders can successfully read and index. If you are absolutely set on using “unfriendly” methods for spiders, make an HTML version of your site so that the spiders can still read it.
There is such a thing as over-optimizing your website. Cramming keywords everywhere is not the proper way to achieve a higher search engine ranking. People often believe that the more keywords, the better. It turns out that search engines will see a site full of keywords as spam, and potentially bump your site down the search results or block it all together. Use the correct keyword frequency for your site to ensure that this doesn’t happen to you.
Going along with this is something that I have mentioned before… make sure you are doing your keyword research! If you don’t optimize your site using the correct keywords, you aren’t going to be getting the traffic from your target audience that you expected to get. What good is that going to do you?
You may have heard that the more back links you include on your site, the better ranking you will have. So, people go off and link pages that are totally irrelevant to what their site is about, just to have this high back link count. This doesn’t not help you at all. Just like keyword cramming, it makes your site look like spam, and has the potential to be banned from search engines. When you do back links, make sure that all of the links are relevant to your site.
By far the most common mistake is that people forget SEO is an ongoing process. Once you optimize you site, you aren’t done. You need to periodically check on your competitors and the changes in search engine ranking algorithms. Are new keywords and phrases being used? Make any necessary changes to your site. Neglecting this can cause your ranking to fall.
Do you want to optimize your site but have no idea where to begin or how to do it? We’d love to help you! Visit us at comstar.biz or call 262-953-6000 for more info!