Lesson 10 – Common mistakes that webmasters make

Webmasters who are looking to improve the traffic of their site are embracing search engine optimization. They feel that by making their web site search engine optimized, they will increase search engine rankings and thus traffic. This line of thinking is correct, but the reality is, most webmasters who think they know search engine optimization really don’t. Not knowing SEO really hurts their web sites.

A bad SEO technique is as bad as not having any SEO done at all. As a SEO savvy webmaster, this is something you never want to do. To avoid this, you’ll need to know the mistakes that webmasters make. We’ll tell you about those in this lesson.

Mistake #1: Bad Navigation

In the hopes of attracting search engine spiders, many webmasters neglect the simplest and perhaps most important part of a web site: the design. Webmasters fail to remember that not just spiders will be on this site, but also human people. These people don’t want to go to a site with a bad design and horrible navigation. If they come across such a site, they are inclined to never visit it again. Webmasters should never forget to think about their visitors and what they’d like to see. If they do, they’ll end up making a bad impression and losing potential visitors.

Mistake #2: Too Many Keywords

When SEO first came along, some webmasters began to find ways of getting an advantage above others. One such popular tactic was that of keyword stuffing. If you don’t already know, keyword stuffing is the process of placing a lot of keywords in a piece of content in order to attract more search engine spiders and boost their traffic. However, search engine web sites caught on to this and began to program spiders to ignore sites with larger than allowed numbers of keywords. Nowadays, web sites are ignored for having too many keywords. Don’t make this same mistake—stick to a keyword density of 3-5% and you’ll be fine.

Mistake #3: Not Enough Keywords

While some people stuff their pages with keywords, others don’t use enough keywords. Don’t think that using a keyword 5 times in a 1000 word piece of content is enough. It’s not. It barely makes a dent from a SEO standpoint and will not do much to bring spiders to your site. That’s why you should make sure you use enough keywords in a page of content. Like we said above, 3-5% is sufficient.

Mistake #4: Incorrect Title

As you probably already know, the title tag is the first thing that visitors and spiders see when they come to your site. It is supposed to be a description of what your site is all about. When a title fails to be an accurate description of the site, it is considered to be an incorrect title tag. If you have an incorrect title tag on your site, you can pretty much kiss SEO good bye. It really is that important. A correct title tag would be something like Name of site.com   Home of ‘niche’. A bad title tag would be keyword, keyword.

Mistake #5: The Same Title Tag

This is a very common mistake among those webmasters who want to create a site that is the same throughout. Having the same title tag on every single page of a site is bad because it makes the site seem unoriginal and fails to describe what each page on the site is. When making title tags for your site, make sure they are page specific.

Mistake #6: Bad Content

Many webmasters are so obsessed with title tags and keyword usage that they forget about the actual content. The content is a huge part of the SEO process. Content that features poor grammar and spelling can really harm a site’s chance to rise in search engine rankings. You have to remember that not just spiders, but actual humans will be reading your site, so you should remember that it is at least readable for them.

Mistake #7: Hidden Text

Hidden text is essentially just like keyword stuffing. It involves writing a bunch of keywords in the page and making them invisible to everyone else. Only spiders can see them, and the hope of this is to gain more attention from the search engine spider. However, that does not occur anymore because of the fact that spiders are smarter than that. They will not pay attention to a site with keyword stuffing or hidden text, period.

Lesson 10 Wrap-Up:

In this lesson, you learned about the top mistakes webmasters make in SEO. Hopefully by knowing about these, you won’t end up making the same mistakes they did.