I have found that a lot of businesses who think they have gotten SEO in the bag, and believe that their websites are in tip top shape, in order to rank well in the search engines, make the same easy to fix mistakes.

Of the mistakes I have seen made, or of those that could potentially be made, here are the 5 most common SEO mistakes.

SEO Mistakes # 1:

Using the same Meta tags in Title, keyword and description on all of their pages. If you have a site that offers different services it’s good to have a page for each one with DIFFERENT keywords descriptions etc.

For Example if you are an accountant and you do tax returns, bookkeeping, financial planning etc. You should have a general home page and then other pages that target the individual things. Search Engines think you are irrelevant if you have the keyword “bookkeeping” in a page that is all about financial planning.

What many small businesses do is have meta keywords like “Accountancy, chartered account, bookkeeping, financial planning, tax returns” on every page.

SEO Mistakes #2:

Not putting ALT text with their imagesSmall business man Confused by SEO. “IMG -234″ etc is not a useful search term.

If you have images on your site use the ALT text field with relevant keywords for the description. This is good for search engines and good for people. The Alt Text field is the text you see when the image can’t be displayed. People see them sometimes when they have a certain set up on their computer and it’s what programs that read sites for the vision impaired use to describe the picture to people who can’t see it.

Its also what google images use to find relevant images in that search, so relevant ALT text can improve your SEO on many levels.

NB Some websites use “images” as their menu buttons, it’s VERY important if you are doing that that you use the ALT text to name the internal link. Also, some templates use images for their graphic design, too many of those just look like a mess to the search engines and it’s probably better to re-do the whole site in a different way. ( This is what I have to do with my natural therapies site). Its easier to re-do it from the start and copy the text than to try and get in and fix it all.

SEO Mistakes #3:

Using too many Key-Words. You should only use between 3 and 10 keywords in the meta tags per page. Most small businesses try and think of anything their customers might be searching for and whack it in the meta tag. Search engines see this and think you are not focused enough. They are trying to find the most relevant page for the search query. The more you have the less relevant they figure you must be to any one search term.

Related to this is putting in nearby suburbs as keyword tags. Unless you mention the suburb throughout your page google think you are trying to “keyword stuff” , they don’t like that!

This is where keyword research comes in. You can’t be all things to all searches, you need to pick a few targeted keywords that people are searching for and are relevant to the particular page. This leads us to common mistake number 4…

SEO Mistakes #4:

Poor choice of keywords placed in the META keyword tag. Sure it might seem logical to target the word “printers” if you run a printer repair business in Blanchardstown, but think about it, even if you succeeded in ranking well for such a competitive term (you won’t), how many of the people visiting your site as a result of this search would leave as soon as they saw your home page? That’s right, most of them. All the people who wanted to buy printers, all the people looking for businesses outside Blanchardstown, all the people not looking specifically for printer repairers.

Does it become clear now that targeting such a generic word is a waste of time? What you need to do instead is optimize your site for search terms and phrases that are highly targeted to your precise business. Use a tool such as Google’s Keyword Tool to find what people are actually typing in to the search engines to find goods and services similar to yours and concentrate on ranking well for those terms. The more qualified your site visitors are, the more likely you are to convert those visitors into paying customers.

SEO Mistakes #5:

A Lack of Optimized Body Text. This one is very common. How often do you visit a home page that is made up entirely of graphics? You know the ones, they consist of an enormous Flash file or maybe a large logo or a montage of images, but the thing they have in common is a distinct lack of text. Think they look professional? Think again. No matter what you read or hear, if a site has no text on the home page, it hasn’t been correctly optimized and has little chance of ranking well in the search engines. Now that’s unprofessional in my opinion.

Beginner SEO’s often make the mistake of creating an optimized title tag and META tags and believing their work is done. WRONG. If you want a web site to rank well in the search engines, you need to give them what they want to see, visible content that is optimized just as well as the invisible content. That means adding keyword-filled body text to any page you want ranking high. Why? Because most search engines can’t index images. Some engines don’t even index META tags anymore. So a site with no visible content becomes effectively invisible to a search engine and has almost no chance of appearing in the rankings for logical searches.

Also, search engine algorithms have become smarter and are now checking that sites contain highly relevant content before including them in their index. If you expect to rank well for a particular keyword or phrase, it’s not too much to expect to find that keyword or phrase within your site is it?

So if you think you have your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) covered for your site, it might be a good idea to run through the above checklist. Better to be safe than sorry.

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