Top 10 Common SEO Mistakes SEO Mistakes should be avoided	Visited: 1546 4.0/5.0 (4 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Neeraj Srivastava May 28, 2008

Webmasters spend a lot of time and efforts on optimizing a website. They try different strategies to get higher search engine rankings for their website, but some of them fail to get desired results just because of some mistakes. In this article I have listed some common mistakes which should be avoided while optimizing a website as they may have adverse effect on your Search engine rankings:

1. Keyword Stuffing: Putting the same keyword again and again or using hundred different spellings or tenses of the same keywords in your keyword meta tag is known as keyword stuffing and considered as spam by search engines. You must avoid it as it may harm your search engine rankings.

2. Duplicate Content: Make sure to have some unique and informative content for users on all web pages, it must be related to your business. Having the same content on your different pages of website must be avoided as it may have an adverse effect on your search engine rankings.

3. ALT Tags: Do not forget to add ALT tag while using images in your website. You can use your targeted keywords also in ALT tags. It makes your website accessible for search engine spiders.

4. Framesets: Avoid using framesets as frames-based pages behave differently from standard Web pages, affecting essential Web functions like printing and navigation. search engines cannot index framesets.

5. Navigation and internal linking: Proper navigation and internal linking is also matters a lot. Navigation menu should be easily accessible by users. Make sure that the anchor text linking to pages within your own website is relevant to the target page.

6. Anchor Text of Inbound links: Having a lot of inbound links is not enough but the anchor text pointing to these links is also very important. The anchor text should be targeted to your main keywords and the web page they point to should have those keywords.

7. Redirects: Redirect is used to re-route users from one URL to another and search engines consider it as you are trying to trick them. You must avoid it, if necessary then use only '301 redirect' which is the safest method to redirect.

8. Cloaking: Cloaking is a technique used by some webmasters to display different pages to the search engine spiders than the ones normal visitors see. You should always avoid any form of cloaking as it strongly forbidden by most major search engines now.

9. Over Optimisation: Over optimization shows that your site has been designed for search engines and not for users. It may drop your search engine rankings as search engines are now able to detect over optimized sites so you must avoid over optimization.

10. Impatience: Search engine optimization requires a lot of patience. You must wait for few months for results after optimizing your website. Have a little patience and you will get your desired results if you properly optimized your website using ethical SEO techniques.