SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

December 4th, 2007 Posted in Uncategorized

If you’re after making some money online and you know jack about SEO, it’s about time you learn a thing or two. Without traffic from search engines, it becomes very difficult to monetize a site. This post is not meant to act as an introductory course for newcomers to the SEO game, but is rather meant to point out some common mistakes which novice SEOs make.

Having Textual Website Content In Images

This is probably one of the more irritating things which makes experienced SEOs cringe. Your website’s content does not belong in image files. Period. It doesn’t matter how cool the font is or how well it blends in with the layout. Search Engines cannot parse images to find your textual content. All they will see is a page full of images and nothing more. This can destroy not only your SEO efforts, but also your site’s monetization potential. Do yourself and the search engines a favor, keep your content out of images.

Not Titling Your Pages

Have you ever found yourself on a site whose pages all had the identical title “Untitled”? Chances are the webmaster accidentally forgot to title the pages before publishing the website. This type of accident can literally eradicate all your chances of ranking for your desired keywords. The page title is one of the most important on-page SEO factors. Each of your pages should have a unique title targeting keywords which you wish to rank for. Without the appropriate titles, your website will never reach its full potential.

Leaving Out Alt Tags

Many seem to dislike adding Alt tags to their images. While alt tags are nowhere near as important as title tags or the anchor text of links pointing to your site, they can have some effect on your rankings in the SERPs. Alt tags are designed to display a snippet of text when an image cannot be retrieved. They also display this same snippet of text when they are hovered over. Search engines can crawl this text and thus get a better idea of what your site is about. With that being said, it doesn’t hurt to add one of your keywords to your alt tags, such as “widget picture 1,” widget being your keyword. Make sure you don’t exaggerate as stuffing keywords in alt tags CAN hurt your SERP rankings.

Not Utilizing H1 Tags

H1 tags, also called header tags, should be used to help paint an image of your site to the search engine spiders. As such, including keywords pertinent to a site’s page can really help increase the amount of overall organic traffic to the site. While many webmasters find it is more lucrative to use images for headers, it is definitely a better idea to opt for using H1 tags. Again, make sure you don’t stuff keywords into your H1 tags as it could end up hurting your search engine rankings.

In Closing

There are without a doubt many more mistakes which novice SEOs make that negatively impact their search engine rankings. Realistically speaking, no site can be 100% optimized for search engine crawlers. However, every effort should be taken to near that figure. If you feel that your knowledge in SEO is lacking, take some time to read up on it in forums and on other sites. If you are willing to spend some money, you may want to head over to Aaron Wall’s site.

Image: Peter Forret

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