10 Common SEO Mistakes that can Destroy Your Website

10 Common SEO Mistakes that can Destroy Your Website

There are many techniques and “tricks” you can
use to edge out the competition in search engine results. However, in
the process of trying to be competitive, the last thing you want to do
is shoot yourself in the foot with overzealous SEO tactics. In part one,
I discussed a few of the top SEO mistakes and a little bit about making
sure you use your primary keyword phrase in both your title and your
permalink, and make sure that you build your site from the beginning in a
way that’s search engine friendly. However, moving forward with your
website or blog, you’ll also want to make sure that all new content is
effectively optimized to attract the most traffic possible.


Now, when you have to make a living doing this, the only way to
survive is by learning what actually creates positive traffic
growth. When many people think about search engine optimization, they
don’t consider the possibility that by attempting to optimize, you could
actually be doing more damage than if you’d done nothing at all. This
is because Google has had to deal with unscrupulous characters
attempting to “outsmart” the Google algorithm, so now that algorithm is
arranged to penalize anyone attempting to use those tactics – whether
it’s intentional or not. If you happen to make one of those top SEO
mistakes, your website rank will actually drop and you’ll see much less
search engine traffic than normal. So how do you avoid those pitfalls?


The following tips will guide you through the process.

SEO Mistake #6 – The Cardinal Sin – Keyword Spamming

There is nothing that Google hates more than a website that attempts
to hijack the crawler with an overabundance of particular keyword
phrases. You can be certain that if you are targeting the phrase “make
money online,” and plaster the phrase all over your article a dozen
times (this is known as keyword “stuffing”), you may actually see an
immediate short term spike in traffic to that page. However, you can
also be certain that in time, not only will that traffic drop off
quickly, but your entire domain will struggle to rank very highly (if at
all) in Google search results under every keyword phrase you write
about. An example of keyword spamming is shown here, from Team-Schuman.

On this single page, I counted the occurrence of the keyword phrase
“make money” a whopping total of 30 times. This approach may achieve
temporary success, but don’t be fooled. Before long you’ll be wondering
what happened when your site is nowhere to be found on Google. Don’t get
me wrong, distributing high-value keyword phrases is essential to
quality SEO, but it needs to be done in a measured and careful way.

SEO Mistake #7 – Spamming for Backlinks

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve always preached that you should post on
forums and blogs in order to generate quality backlinks to your own
site. This is what I described in my recent article on increasing blog traffic when I mentioned engaging the blogosphere every single
day. However, simply posting for the sake of achieving a link back to
your site is a major social networking no-no. A somewhat humorous
example I saw take place was on a MakeUseOf article on how to remove false information about yourself online. It appeared that
one of the folks posted repeated comments was trying to hijack the
comment area into an area for self-advertising.

Some folks even “stage” conversations within the comment areas of
blogs to generate interest. If your only purpose for posting comments to
a blog or forum is to generate a link to your site, don’t bother. It
won’t win you any fans within the industry or niche that you’re trying
to target, and secondly, the transparency of the effort will make most
readers skim right past your comment, or even worse you could get
banned.

SEO Mistake #8 – Not Optimizing Images

In 2007, on the Google
Webmaster Central blog, Google’s own Ríona MacNamara provided
a very important clue to SEO enthusiasts with the statement, “As
the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally
concentrate on the information provided in the ‘alt’ attribute.” So,
what does this mean for your SEO efforts? It means that you better start
taking advantage of your image alt-text tags if you want to have some
advantage over your competition.

In the example above, this is an upcoming article I’m writing for my
blog, FreeWritingCenter. As you can see, the entire phrase that I’m
targeting is “writing a research paper,” so I’ve inserted that as the
alt-text for my first image. However, you’ll notice that the title is
simply a description of the picture itself. You only need to target the
alt-text picture tags for your keywords, and only add them to a few
pictures, otherwise you’ll run the risk of getting labeled as a spammer.
As always – distribute the keywords carefully and sparingly.

SEO Mistake #9 – Producing Stupid, Poorly-Written Content

One of the worst symptoms of black-hat SEO scammers trying to
outsmart Googlebot’s crawl algorithm is the evolution of
“content-mills.” Now, given just about every blog out there is a content
mill to some extent, at least when there’s a certain level of
investment and quality checks in place, you know that the articles you
read are going to be written using proper grammar, offer a decent style
of writing and provide useful content. However, there are countless
blogs and writers out there who simply churn out 500 word blocks of text
as fast as they can with the hopes of capturing search engine traffic.
If you want to see an example, just review any of the major free article
directories, such as EzineArticles.

Now, I’m not knocking EzineArticles. I’m a registered author there,
and whenever I need to publish something online quickly and there’s no
other place to do it, I’ll publish it there. However, there are
countless authors who just publish the first draft of whatever mindless
drivel comes out of their heads. There’s no editing, no spell checking
and in most cases I’m pretty sure there’s no writing background to speak
of. This phenomenon is leading to an Internet that’s cluttered with
some of the most atrocious writing imaginable.


What does this have to do with SEO? The SEO lesson to learn here is
this: Yes, Google prefers websites and blogs that are fresh and
constantly updated with new content, but that doesn’t mean you should
ever overlook quality just to get your content published quickly. Focus
on producing high-quality, valuable content that people will want to
link to and return to again and again.

SEO Mistake #10 – Submitting Your Website

Do you remember the days when trying to get your website noticed
online meant submitting your URL to as many search engines as possible?
The fact is, these submission forms still exist on many of the major
search engines even though they are completely outdated and unnecessary.

In fact, if you look at Yahoo’s own submission page and read the text
carefully, you’ll find that Yahoo makes the case that you’re really
wasting your time. The page reads, “The Yahoo! Search index, which
contains several billion web pages, is more than 99% populated through
the free crawl process.” Now, with 99% chances that the Yahoo crawl
process will discover your website (especially if you’ve properly
optimized it), do you really think you need to fill out these silly
submission forms?