Common SEO Mistakes to be avoided while optimizing website

Certain website parameters can damage or limit your potential search engine rankings. By avoiding these general SEO pitfalls, you can smooth the way for higher search engine visibility. Below, I will show you some common mistakes that most of the beginner SEO guys commit while performing optimization.

Insufficient inbound links

One of the major problems with low level ranking websites is a lack of inbound links which are popular. Without a reasonable number of high quality links, you will be at a disadvantage against a competitor who has more links than you. Other linking problem include links to flagged sites, inappropriate redirects, lack of relevant keywords, and generic link text.

Splash pages

Splash pages are graphically rich pages intended to astonish visitors or to direct
them to alternative views of content, such as a very high, medium or low bandwidth versions of a site. A “Skip Intro” link on a web page itself says that the web page that visitor is going to see is not very important. The issue with splash pages, whether they include “Skip Intro” links or not is that they are an opportunity which is wasted. Splash pages typically reside at the very top of a site’s hierarchy. Web pages that are higher in your site hierarchy are likely to get more links and hence more traffic than web pages that are lower in hierarchy. If visitors of a site must have to click and if search engines must have to parse and crawl farther to reach the actual home page (i.e. what should be your high level main or index page), you have definitely put up a obstacle to success.

Flash player and Flash Content

Flash player needs to be installed computer that is accessing the website content which includes Flash. Flash came with different versions. Older versions may not support flash content created in newer versions. Another problem with Flash is that search engines cannot properly index the content present in flash file. I recommend using Flash to improve the user browsing experience, not to create it totally in flash. One method you can use to make your Flash web pages more SEO friendly is the 2 div approach. Using one div for the Flash movie, and other div with its HTML equivalent. If any flash plug-in is available and it is compatible then show div containing flash and hide the other div, else vice verse.

Unprofessional design

It’s a very true saying that “A first impression is the last impression”. Your website can take only few seconds to make an impression to the new visitor and it will also affect your long term success in terms of visitor loyalty. Having a well designed website is the most critical factor for apparent web credibility. The more your site is aesthetically strong, the higher its credibility will be. Customers are also more willing to buy from websites that are well designed. Web credibility, valuable content, and useful tools are key factors that compel webmasters to link to you, and visitors to stay and spend money.

Poor navigation

The navigation on your website should include text that is easily indexed and that was not created from JavaScript, or any Flash object. Search engines can only read and index the content within your pages. They cannot read text that is embedded in images or Flash movies, nor do they run JavaScript snippets. Though modern search engine practices may include to read text present in images but it has yet not achieved so far, therefore you need to stick to equivalent text. It may be in the form of Alt tags. By embedding your main keywords in images or graphics, you lose a golden opportunity to swelter your SEO directly into the information design of your site.

Duplicate content

Avoid duplicates of pages at different locations in your website. Although Google representative Matt Cutts mentioned that there is no penalty for duplicate content, but Google’s own guidelines say “don’t create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” Google usually tries to show the best version of a resource, but in rare cases it can penalize a website that shows to game the system with duplicate content. The use of duplicate titles across too many web pages on the same website can damage rankings and PR. Duplicate content may confuse the crawlers of different search engines as to which page is authoritative, thereby diluting your Page Rank among the various URLs. You can use the protocol to exclude duplicate content. (See here for more details http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html).