Search engine optimization has become the focus of many people who have online businesses and for good reason. If you can be noticed and ranked well by search engines, you will be more visible to current and future customers. Optimization is something that so many web publishers are pursuing but in the course of trying to be noticed many are making some huge mistakes. These mistakes can easily be avoided, and many have found these mistakes to be hampering their success by trial and error.
Website owners have now become more SEO savvy and have used SEO to unleash the business potential of their websites. Though, SEO industry is evolving fast, there are some basic principles which have to be adhered no matter what. Similarly, there are some SEO mistakes which though may seem basic can cost rankings on search engines:
Title Tags with No Keywords: Lot of times, we see web page titles with just company name or some other inappropriate text with no relevance to the actual content of the page. A title tag is meant to educate both SE's and a human user about the theme of the webpage. Title tag can be one of the most on-page factors that determine your ranking in search results.
Improper URLs: Long URLs with parameters can be incomprehensible for both a site visitor and SE spider. Descriptive filenames with appropriate keywords not only assists a user but also may help in search results. A word of caution: Don't overuse keywords in filenames.
Poor Navigation & No Sitemaps: Spider bots rely on navigation and sitemaps to index pages. Menus made in Flash and JavaScript are unreadable to bots and they may choose to ignore them. Sitemaps, both HTML and XML allow search engine spiders to efficiently and quickly crawl a website. Avoid menu made in flash & JavaScript and always provide sitemap for ease of navigation. Use text as far as possible for creating menus.
Inappropriate Anchor Text: "Click here" or "Learn More" are just couple of examples of anchor text which should be strictly avoided as they do not tell anything about the page linked to. Use descriptive text such as "Arizona SEO Company" which includes your keywords and also relates to the page linked to. Don't use anchor text which has no relation to the linked page.
Disallowing a Search Engine: Many times, a newbie while fiddling with robots.txt file may ban a search engine. Robots.txt file is kept in the website root folder and instructs bots on which folders and pages they can crawl or not. A novice webmaster can mistakenly disallow a search engine bot and thus, search engine bots may not index the website.
The mistakes mentioned above can be easily avoided. Such mistakes can be typically seen in websites which have been optimized by inexperienced SEO consultants or web designers/website owners with little or no knowledge of SEO. Thus, it is always recommended that a website should be optimized by experienced Phoenix SEO. An experienced SEO consultant not only avoids such mistakes but has also in-depth and latest knowledge of SEO industry which can give your website an edge over the competition.
Author: Matt Ridley
