Top 10 SEO Mistakes

1. Targetting the wrong keywords
This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

2. Ignoring the Title tag
Leaving the "title tag" empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your "title tag" shows in the search results as your page title.

3. A Flash website without a html alternative
Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it.

4. JavaScript Menus
Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.

5. Lack of consistency and maintenance
Our friend Rob from Blackwood Productions often encounters clients, who believe that once you optimize a site, it is done foreve. If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines.

6. Concentrating too much on meta tags
A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don't except to rank well only because of this.

7. Using only Images for Headings
Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet or consider this approach: http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text.

8. Ignoring URLs
Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.

9. Backlink spamming
It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks.
10. Lack of keywords in the content
Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.

source : http://www.webconfs.com/

Likes and Dislikes of Googlebots

What is a Googlebot? It is one of the little web-searching spiders (automated) that we talked about in the last section. And these spiders have definite preferences, so you want to make sure your content is good spider food.

Spiders like:

• Neat codeless lines of code than lines of text (or more lines of text than lines of codes.)
• Normal keyword densities of 3-7%.
• Lots of backlinks on pages that link back to your home page. (Top sites have an average of 300 backlinks.)
• Original content not found anywhere else.
• Quick downloads of sites, which means not a lot of dynamic URLS to other sites.
• Site maps.
• ALT Tabs for images.
• Link partners who are contextually relevant to your page (i.e., if your page is about buying real estate, links might about be how to get loans, how to prospect for deals, how to start a corporation but not about pet gerbils, latest fashions, or cell phones.)

• New content every time the spider comes to check up on your site.

Spiders do not like:

• More lines of code than text.
• Nested tables.
• Super-high keyword densities, which they call keyword stuffing.
• Doorway pages that act as a portal and which just happen to have super high keyword densities.
• Too many backlinks to your home page from within your domain.
• Duplicate content from another site regardless of who stole what from whom.
• Lots of dynamic URLs that cause a site to take forever to download.
• Repeating the exact same words in your linking text, which the spider will interpret as automated link swapping. (Interestingly, it is fine for the spiders to be fully automated, but they hate it when we do that!)
• Stale content that never changes.

source : http://adsense.blogcuzade.com/