SEO or search engine optimization is something which is done by most webmasters to get good traffic from the search engines. If the webmaster does it themselves it is almost free and if they employ an expert, then it can cost a good sum of money. Therefore a small website owner will prefer to do the search engine optimization himself. It is not a big deal and with a little practice, can be mastered. However there are some common mistakes which any newbie will inevitably make. Here are the five common mistakes which if rectified will go a long way in preventing anything going wrong as far as search engine optimization is considered.
Non-search engine friendly website – If you want to employ SEO to increase your website traffic from search engines, you must never design a site which is not Search Engine friendly. The website must not have too many flash elements or Java script elements since the search engine crawlers are unable to index data that is using Flash or Java Script. As you are aware that a web crawler is a computer program which index data from different websites which is the basic on which the search engines rank the websites.
It is a policy of Google Yahoo search engines to rank free web hosting sites very low and sometimes even block such websites. The most probable reason could be that the contents of such websites are of very poor quality. Therefore never choose a free web hosting service.
Another common blunder which many SEO experts do is to stuff their sites with Keywords. Adding too many Keywords is known as keyword stuffing and once identified will be contrived as a ploy to fool the search engine algorithms and will be penalized very severely. Ideally any content must not have more than 3% KW density. Another common blunder which webmasters make is to choose a KW which is very general like car, ship, and train or sky. This will bring your rankings drastically and the search engines will contrive it as a poorly maintained website.
Too many broken links is also a sign that the website is not properly maintained and hence will be ranked poorly by search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Broken links can be easily found out by using special tools such as iWebTool which will identify the broken link to effect its easy removal.