Top Five Mistakes in Search Engine Optimization

Top five mistakes in search engine optimization are: keyword stuffing, link stuffing, directory submission, content building and lastly backlinking. If you want to rank high in Google and other search engines then you need to avoid these five mistakes. Keyword stuffing mainly involves filling a page with keywords that are irrelevant to the topic. This makes the site look disorganized and also increases the chance of being penalized by Google for the bad search engine optimization practices. Backlinking is also a form of keyword stuffing and is similar to directory submission.

Backlinks serve as the best indicator of the popularity of a site in the Internet. Google penalizes sites which have too many inbound links to their site. So you should understand how important it is to get only quality links to your site. You can increase your search engine optimization by focusing on generating quality backlinks to your site.

Another common mistake in SEO is content building. Many webmasters are not clear about what content they should be putting on their site. They simply think that if they can put enough content on their site, then it will be accepted and ranked high in the search engines. However, this is totally false. The content in your site should be related to your site’s theme, tags and title.

The third mistake is link building. Link building is very important since it determines the popularity of your site. Backlinks also affect the rank of your site in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Search engines determine the rank of your site by the quality of the incoming links to your site. There are many ways to obtain targeted website link such as article submissions, forum posting, directory submissions, guest blogging, press releases, blog commenting, forum posting, social bookmarking and so on.

The fourth mistake is linking to useless contents. Search engines are becoming picky about the contents these days. A lot of websites have resorted to writing useless articles just to attract visitors. This is a big no-no as the search engines does not like such websites. It will not only damage your page rank but also drive traffic away from your site.

The fifth mistake is link farming. This is another big no-no when it comes to search engine optimization. It is considered spam by search engines. This strategy of getting tons of backlinks without doing anything is called “link farming”. If you want to get the attention of the search engine algorithms, you need to employ this strategy.

The sixth mistake is not linking the right anchor text to your website. You must have noticed that when you click on an online link, the hyperlink takes you to the specified page or site? This is also a big mistake. Most people do not know that the anchor texts are what is used to identify the website that linked to them.

The seventh mistake is keyword stuffing. When you are optimizing a site for the first time, it is not a good idea to cram all the keywords that you can think of into your site. Keyword stuffing will not bring success to your site. Try to create meaningful words and phrases in order to attract targeted traffic to your site.

The eighth mistake that most people make is using improper keywords in their web pages. This is a very big mistake for those who are just starting to learn about search engines and their optimization techniques. There are many tools that are available online that you can use in order to identify the proper keywords for your site. Once you identify the proper keywords for your site, try to drop as few of them as possible into your site content.

The ninth mistake is to underestimate the importance of Meta tags. These are the textually defined keywords that appear at the beginning, end, and within the Meta tag of a web page. Many people who are new to SEO believe that these keywords are not that important when it comes to search engine rankings. While it is true that these top five mistakes may hurt your site’s rankings initially, this is a misconception.

The last mistake that you need to avoid when it comes to search engine optimization is duplicate content. Although there are some cases where copying content from other sites will help you get higher rankings, this is not a good practice to follow on a regular basis. Duplicate content is considered to be a major spamming method that may have a negative impact on your website. The best way to ensure that your website will remain in its natural state is to avoid copying content from other websites.