Top Five Seo Mistakes For 2010

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It won’t have escaped your notice that we have started a new year and a new decade, so with this in mind let’s take a look at setting a new standard for your website and it’s SEO. The first thing to do is to look at the most common SEO mistakes so we can develop a plan to avoid them. For most businesses, web presence has become or is becoming an essential interface between customers, clients and your business function. Leaving aside paid advertising as a method of reaching your potential market most of us find a better conversion and ROI using organic search rankings as the primary method used to find your company, products, or services. Whether it’s Google, Bing, Yahoo or another search engine that people use to find your website the way your site is optimised for search engines has a direct and fundamental effect on how you are ranked by the search engines.The top five most common mistakes made are as follows.Number 1 – Title Tag Wrong or duplicate tag on a web page. This is still so often ignored or forgotten. The title tag is the text that is displayed in the top bar of firefox/internet explorer. In much the same way the title on the spine of a book gives an indication to the perspective reader, the tag gives website visitors and search engines a similar indication as to the subject matter of a web page. As this is usually one of the search bots first port of call when crawling your page. Get this wrong and they are misled as to the pages’ content!Number 2 – Over Optimisation Over optimisation, both on page and off page, is another cause for the search bots to downgrade the relevance and importance to your website. If the algorithms determine that your keyword or keyterm occurrence is too high then their use becomes counter-productive and causes the page to be marked down in the eyes of the search engines. The over or unnatural use of keywords in , heading and alt tags can also trigger a downgrading from the search engines, this is more often referred to as ‘keyword stuffing’. Although most SEO plans are based around ethical practices there exists the practice of buying links, whilst not recommended, it is worth noting that if you were to use this frowned upon technique, the using the same anchor text again and again in these links without a decent amount of variation will also have a negative effect, particularly if the bought links’ anchor text is used in the and heading tags of the page being linked to.Number 3 – Relevant Content The next worst mistake is the lack of relevant content with respect to your tags. More often this is not a problem if the website is built organically, in a user centric manner, and with ethicality in mind. However it is still number 3 because if you get this one wrong then the search bots and the algorithms will not assess your pages’ relevance very highly and consequently your rankings will more than likely be lower compared to a page with relevant content.Number 4 – Loading Speed This is a relative newcomer to the list of mistakes. That is the factors that affect the loading speed of the page. From massive page size and large images/flash to non-validated html and many other factors, the speed at which your page loads is big factor that Google stated recently will have much greater impact on rankings in the near future. This will kick in more and more over the coming months as the full Google caffeine makeover comes into effect in early 2010.Number 5 – Wrong Keywords Wrong choice of meta keywords. This is the last in the list due to Google largely ignoring the meta keywords tag, however we still included it to make sure people understand it is still important to choose your keywords or keyterms carefully, whether or not you actually enter them into the meta keytwords tag. The other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing may still use the meta keywords tag, but as with all search engine algorithms there is some conjecture of whether they regard these as important and if so, how important they actually are in determining your rankings. Choosing keyterms that are not relevant, or are too competitive for where your website is at the moment and can reasonably be expected to be in the near future can cause a seriously reduced ROI. It is also worth mentioning that if you use the services of an search engine optimisation agency, then you need to be sure that you choose an ethical one, that will give you honest opinions on decent keyterms, and not just choose easy to rank, low competition ones! If you identify any of these issues with your website then before you do anything this decade you must address them, do it now. There is no real black art at work here, for the most part the search engines are concerned with providing relevant returns to search queries, this enhances the users experience of the search engine and therefore keeps them coming back for more next time they search. This in turn means that the search engine has a guaranteed audience for its main income, advertising revenue. If you keep this in mind whilst looking at your website, spotting potential problems should be easier and less of a mystery. Basically make sure both search engines and visitors get a clear message of what your site is about, without trying to trick or ‘game’ either!.

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