Top SEO Pitfalls to Avoid

Here are the top six most important SEO pitfalls to avoid:

Duplication of content using content farms and small scale content production facilities.

Sometimes designers or website owners will post several pages of the same content on their website or blog, and sometimes they will post several hundred words that have nothing to do with each other on the same site. Google regularly keeps watch for copy/paste and therefore they will more inclined to penalize or even ban a site that they think is trying to deceive them.

Secret paid for links schemes

Some SEO companies will sell link on a page with a promise of traffic from the link partner. Google has its own program for the purchase of paid for text links. In the future this could become a viable tactic for the sale of generic traffic. However the moment billions of people set their sites up with paid link schemes and the engines notice, guess what happens? All these free traffic generating ways will be shut off, and the value of a site could be Forget Google and any chance of challenging their top pages.

Wrong use of keyword rich META tags

META tags are used to specify page description and keywords to search engine. Most search engines display these tags on their result pages. The Meta tags are meant to provide search engines with information about the page. However some SEO experts abuse these tags and stuff them with keywords that have nothing to do with the content of the page. In many cases they just list the company name and homepage domain name in the META tag. In others they list thousands of keywords in the META tags. If you must have lots of keywords in the META tags than I recommend that you consider using a pure text format like HTML format.

Improper use of heading tags

The heading tags are given more weight than the ordinary text. In addition to the H1 tag, ALT text and title tags are also given more weight. A page with well written headings will have a higher click-through rate when people tap on the link. This could be the result of a great headline. You must use the heading tags (H1, H2, H3….) properly. You should not just use H1 tag to write a headline. Use the H1 tag for the main keyword of that page and one other sub-heading that is related to that keyword. Search engines look at these tags to determine the main theme of the page and they also display them in the search results.

Too many 404 errors

When you manually submit a site to search engines you should always make sure that they spider is able to index all pages. If the spider is unable to complete the task, you can manually place a request for the missing pages. Webmasters can sometimes leave sections of their site invisible to spiders using certain tags. If invisible links or text is found a 404 error is returned saying that the page could not be found.

These simple errors will slow down a search engine spider's ability to index your web pages and might affect your page ranking if the spider expects to find some information that does not exist on your web page. You could place a request for assistance on the search engine. The reason for asking for assistance could be that you have entered an incorrect comma or there is a typo on one of your key phrases.

Using frames.

Frames are HTML code that enable the pages to be divided into frames with a small area in between. The problem with frames is that search engines have problems indexing frames. It is difficult for the search engine to follow the links in the frames and the frames are usually hidden from the user unless they use some scripts which can solve this problem. 

These SEO errors are often overlooked by webmasters as they think of the site as a normal website. Few realize the importance of making these points clear to the search engine spiders so that they can help boost their page rank.

Get in touch with a reputable web design or SEO company and get your website audited for errors.