Common SEO Mistakes

Most web sites are created without the knowledge of optimization. Webmasters and business owners simply create sites that they think look good and get their message across. While most sites actually don't even do that well, there are common elements that negatively effect the optimization. Sometimes these are small effects, while others are deadly to ranking.

1. Domain names - A domain name that is not relevant to the keywords you are targeting will have more difficulty and be more expensive to rank with. For example, if you sell leather jackets and the name of your website is ABstyle.com, this has no relevance to the keyword leather jackets. You will want a name that either contains both words or one of the words. If you sell other types of jackets, then you may be more inclined to have a website with jackets in the domain. Search engines place tremendous value on domain names.

2. Titles - Always use keyword rich titles related to your content. This is the link that appears in most search engines and is very important. Most people either don’t name the titles at all or have the same title on every page.

3. Page names - Always use keyword rich page names. The page of the name should be in sync with the title keywords you are using.

4. Size of pages - Using large graphics or content that cause the size of your page to be over 100K is not good. Engines like Google prefer pages under 100K in size.

5. Dynamic pages - Search engines don’t like dynamic databases. Web crawlers have difficulty getting to dynamically generated pages and can get overwhelmed.

6. Javascript - Although javascript can be useful in menus and features on a site, it is not search engine friendly. The engines cannot see what is in the script. So if you have a javascript menu system or other javascript features that carry keyword rich text, they are of no use for ranking.

7. Flash - Similar to javascript in that the search engines simply can’t read the contents within flash. It provides no value to rankings. Also if the file size is made too big, then the engines may just avoid indexing your site all together

8. Frames - Frames tend to cause problems with search engines because every page corresponds to the same URL. The engines return the frame set which essentially makes the individual pages of the site have no value.

9. Password protected pages - A search engine cannot crawl pages that are behind password protection.