1 Top 10 SEO Mistakes Posted by Kapil SEO | at 4:15 AM

Every Search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is a double-edged sword. It’s like traveling in space: one wrong calculation here and one there and you can end up billions of light-years away from your destination. In this post I’m going to suggest 10 SEO mistakes that you should definitely avoid. There are 100s of things that can go wrong, but these top 10 SEO mistakes can cause you the most harm. Here they are:

1) Wrong title of the page
Your title is the first thing the search engine crawlers encounter when they visit your web page. Your title tells the search what your page is about. Even when your link appears in the search results page, it’s your title that attracts the users and makes them click the link. Avoid deceptive titles. Use keywords in your title and be as clear as possible. Another mistake regarding the titles is that sometimes all the pages belonging to a website have the same title: this is a big mistake. Every page of your website should have its own unique title.

2) Wrong selection of keywords
Almost every SEO effort revolves around the chosen keywords and lots of money and time is spent on obtaining a high ranking for the keywords. All the effort will go down the drain if you focus on the wrong keywords. Carefully study what keywords and key phrases your target market is using to find what you have to offer, and then optimise accordingly. Use the free and commercial keyword-analysis tools to zero-in on the precise keywords. Never assume on your own what keywords your target market is using.

3) Having no textual content
No matter how snazzy a website you have, if it doesn’t have enough text, the search engines will never find out what you represent and what product or service you intend to sell.

4) Having wrong content
It is as good as having no content because your bad content will give all the bad information to the search engines. This is partly related to selecting the wrong keywords because even by selecting the wrong keywords you can easily generate wrong content.

5) Choosing the wrong target market
You should know to whom you want to sell, and only then you can properly steer your SEO campaign. If the target market is wrong, how can optimise your website correctly. With wrong target market you’ll be choosing the wrong keywords and misplaced search engine campaigns. Always be sure of whom you want to target.

6) Indiscriminate use of graphics and animations
Graphics and animations look cool, but they only look cool once. They are like a movie: the more times you see them, the less attractive you find them. Unnecessary frills bloat your pages and push your real textual content downwards. Always remember that when the search engine crawlers visit your website they can make no sense of your graphics; they are only looking for the text content.

7) No use of header tags
Header tags — are very important tags because they are supposed to highlight the gist of your web page. To create heading people often use bigger fonts for the tag which is totally wrong. Search engines look for important keywords within your header tags so always use them to highlight the main points of your text, and if possible, use the keywords within the header tags.

8)Excessive use of keywords
People think the more keywords their pages have, the better is the chance of getting ranked hire; this is a complete misconception. Excessive use of keywords can get your website blacklisted on various search engines. Although you must have your keywords and their synonyms in your text they don’t have to appear in every sentence. Just have them in the beginning, within your title and other header tags possibly as anchor text.

9) Wrong linking policy
Linking is a very potent SEO methodology, but only if done properly. Indiscriminate incoming and outgoing links can severely harm your search engine rankings. Try getting inbound links from reputed websites and never link to websites that are considered “bad” (porn, spamming, scams, etc.) by the search engines.

10) Not blogging
Not blogging is a mistake because even if it directly may not affect your rankings (or it may), you can rest assured that your competitors are using it to boost their search engine rankings to get highly relevant traffic.
So avoid these top 10 SEO mistakes and gradually keep climbing up the ladder of higher rankings.