Next 10 Biggest SEO professional mistakes

We already presented 10 Biggest SEO professionals mistakes. Today we will show you Next 10 Biggest SEO professional mistakes. We think that SEO professionals by avoiding these 21 mistakes can drastically improve their site or blog visibility to search engines.

Having Flash-based site:

Sites built in Flash may have a greater aesthetic impact but perform poorly in search engines. Most search engines cannot read text or links embedded in Flash. It is best to limit the use of flash for content which absolutely requires flash or make a text-based alternate for your website so that search engine crawlers can index your site content easily.

Having text in images:

Search engines cannot read text embedded in images. If you have too much content and navigation using graphic, image maps or image buttons, it would be good to either convert them to simple text or have an alternate navigation bar at the bottom of your website. It would also help to have appropriate text in the Alt-Text tag for each image. Similarly

Having frame-based sites:

If you have built your website using frames, you might have a major problem indexing content sitting inside frames. The way frames and the content page URLs are structured, most search engines find it difficult to reach the inner page content of your website. It is best to restructure your website and remove frames so that you can get your site in the search engine index.

Having free content behind login:

Some sites & forums prefer the visitors to login before they can reach the real content of the website. Due to lack of awareness or inadvertently, if you have placed all your content behind a login, then the search engines cannot index your site as their crawlers cannot fill in a login-password or ‘register’ on your website. You might want to restructure your website such that you can show the publicly-available content without the need to login to your website.

Poor site inter-linking:

Poor site interlinking not only poses hurdles to search engines for indexing your site but also makes your site navigation difficult for your site visitors. It is advisable to have a good navigation bar and a site map on your site so that each page is not more than two clicks away.

Deep directory structure:

A deep directory structure is generally difficult for search engines to crawl. While it is not a rule, it would be good if you can keep your directories not more than one or two levels down, neatly classified into ‘themes’. Deep directory structure also makes your inner pages URLs look too long, which discourages other sites to link to your inner pages.

Having less content or Non-original content:

Search engines thrive on text content. They are mainly looking for text content on your website and reward sites which have lots of easily accessible, non-duplicate original text content. If your sites has less or non-original content picked up from other sites or your affiliate sites, it is unlikely that you would be rewarded, no matter how many efforts you put in optimizing your website. A good way to generate original content is to write nice, keyword rich, descriptive articles classified in themes, about your product or service, its usage, benefits and tips etc.

Using session IDs:

Session ID is a long string of jumbled characters appearing in the URL of your website which changes on each visit. They are usually used to track a visitor ’s online shopping cart contents. When a search engine crawler visits your website, your server assigns it a session ID and the crawler indexes your content and associates it with that session ID. Most search engines have hundreds of bots crawling and re-crawling the web. On each repeat visit of the crawler to your website, they index a fresh copy of your content and associates it with different URLs (session IDs) resulting in cluttering the search engine database with lots of duplicate content. Since search engines are not very good at tackling this problem, they often drop the site from future indexing. If you wish to track as user’s session, a better solution is to use cookies instead of session IDs. Cookies are information files stored on user’s computers and perform the same task as a session ID.

No efforts in getting incoming links:

Incoming links to your website are very important and are responsible for high rankings on search engines to a large extent. Link popularity determines how important your site is. Link building is an important part of your SEO campaign. No extent of site optimization can get you high rankings if you do not carry out a supporting link building campaign.

Relying on one-time SEO:

Search engine optimization is a constant process. You need to update your website SEO when you add new content, update old content or change the theme of your web pages. Addition of new content often requires you to update site interlinking, improve navigation and add links in your site map. Search patterns and keyword phrases also change over time as the search community matures or industry trends change. This requires a fresh keyword research and SEO perspective on your site. Changes may also become necessary if your current SEO strategy is not paying off. In any case, optimizing your site once and expecting it to give you sustained results without further efforts is a mistake.

Showing impatience:

SEO of a website rarely show instant results. If your site is already indexed in search engines, it may take about 4-8 weeks to index your new content. New sites may take 4-6 months to get indexed for the first time. It takes time for SEO results to show up. It is easy to think the past efforts were not good enough and get tempted to change the optimization techniques. It is not advisable to change the optimization of your site pages before you are able to see the results of your previous SEO efforts.

If you keep the above points in mind while carrying out SEO for your site, you would be safe from any penalties. If you are outsourcing your site SEO to a professional company, make sure they adhere to the above guidelines and do not risk your site into a search engine penalty. Remember, just a few precautions can go a long way in having your site rank high and stay away from undesirable search engine penalties.