Top 5 SEO mistakes

Today I wanted to go over the top 5 SEO mistakes made by bloggers and other web people across the World Wide WebJ. Before I begin let me briefly touch on what exactly SEO is in the first place, I assume you have a general idea since you're reading this post but repetition never hurt anyone.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is a way to optimize your website for maximum "findability" if that is even a word. It's a process you go through to make your website search engine friendly for both search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others. But if you go too heavy here you start to sound like a robot and so the other side of the coin is to make the sites or pages searcher friendly as well.


Again, this post is not intended to go into SEO step by step as I assume you know a bit about SEO and besides, there are other places that can tell you in greater detail how to implement as great SEO strategy without making these top 5 SEO mistakes.

Without further ado, allow me to present to you the top 5 SEO mistakes.

1. Targeting the wrong keywords and phrases
   
   If you do everything wrong, please make sure you do this right; otherwise you're just wasting your time. If you're targeting the wrong keywords and long tail phrases, don't expect any real traffic to hit your site. A very important part of this is to make sure you understand the keyword analysis process you need to go through to come up with the right keywords. If you target words that no one is searching for, you get no traffic.
   
   Often times I see newbies claim that they are number one on Google for a set of keywords but they don't realize that there is no competition for those words and the reason for the lack of competition is because those keywords carry no weight, otherwise stated, no one uses those keywords in searches, hence no traffic. Make sure you do you keyword research.
   
   
2. Low quality content
   
   You need to have good content on your site or blog or whatever web medium you use. Good content draws people in and is crucial to your lasting success. Quality content brings in searchers and search engine spiders that crawl the web looking for quality content that they can index. If you run a site or blog with poorly written content, a site that is rarely updated and when it is updated, you write mundane crap that no one cares about, well guess what, how long would you stay on a site that wrote crap, answering that question may just be your answer.
   
   Don't write irrelevant posts, if you're going to write about the top 5 SEO mistakes, then do it, don't write about your lunch with a friend in Salt Lake City just because you found those keywords easier to rank with. Again, don't make mistake number one, you need to have highly targeted keywords sprinkled in the body of your content. Search engine crawlers or spiders eat this stuff up but only if it tastes good and they have a distinguished palate. Basically if you want to have high rankings on good keywords and are going to take the time to write content, make sure it's good, quality content.
   
   
3. Black hat SEO
   
   What is black hat SEO? Well it's the opposite of white hat SEO. That says it all doesn't it? No, it doesn't so read on. Black hat SEO is a technique which oddly is still used by many, it is a technique that definitely worked in the past and still works today but because of the constant algorithm changes of Google and other search engines, it's not worth the trouble anymore because you can really tarnish your name and reputation for good.
   
   Basically black hat SEO is an in a way unethical technique that is absolutely hated by search engines and their loyal spiders. Common black hat stuff includes invisible text, keyword stuffing, doorways, and other such crap. In the past these were used to raise your rankings, now days it's a whole lot more difficult than that. The problem and I know I've said this before on this site but the problem is that if you think you can trick Google, you're wrong, and you're wrong because if you could fool Google, you'd be working for Google.
   
   Over the years search engine spiders have gotten smarter, their algorithms have become better at catching black hat SEO techniques because with time comes experience. It's a lot like life insurance, with every year that passes, life insurance companies become more and more accurate in telling you precisely when you're going to die and this is because they have one more year of data under their belt. Basically avoid this stuff like the black plague and you will be better off in the long run.
   
   
4. Not using META tags or using them wrong
   
   I know you've probably heard that Meta tags are dead but this is where the problems come in. Meta tags are not dead, just because Google is the biggest dog in town and chooses to not fully use Meta tags doesn't mean you should. By the way, Google uses some Meta tags and so here's another reason you should be using them.
   
   Meta tags can include a large number of things but for our purposes I am going to limit the discussion to the most widely used ones. When discussing Meta tags for the web make sure you include description tags, keyword tags, and title tags. Those are top three Meta tags you should always be using. Some may tell you that Meta tags are dead but again, they aren't. Let me ask you this, would you rather leave it to a bot to decide what the title of you post is or your site or your page or would you rather have the ability to tell the bot exactly what's on the site. I think you'd probably go with the second option and that would be a wise choice.
   
   Meta tags play an important role in the overall SEO strategy and that is why they are one of the most commonly made mistakes in SEO. Meta tags play a big role in your rankings, only take a few minutes to implement since you've hopefully did you keyword research beforehand and so you should already have most of the data that you need at hand. Select your keywords and use them in your Meta tags.
   
   
5. An ugly site
   
   Let me first begin by stating that nowadays you have no excuse to having an ugly website. Back in the day you needed to know Photoshop, slicing, and how to put them all together right. Now you don't need to know any of this. If you're using any of the popular blogging platforms, there are so many designers showing off their skills for free or very cheaply that you really don't have an excuse to having an ugly site.
   
   Now, it's one thing to have a pretty website with flash and colors, and all kinds of odd crap plastered all over the place and it's a whole different thing to have a site that is user-friendly, effective, incorporates a navigational panel, and is basically easy on the eyes. Having lots of graphics on your site is okay if you're running a gallery and only if you use thumbnails. Having lots of flash is okay as long as your site isn't created primarily out of flash. Flash can't be indexed as it can't be seen by the spiders, flash to this day is not available on mobile devices like smart phone and other fancy stuff we love to use and the world is moving to.
   
   Another problem with an ugly site is that it's usually ugly for a reason and that reason usually has something to do with the design and navigation. If a site is difficult to navigate to a search bot, it will be very difficult to navigate to a human user. For this reason search engines may come back once or twice to see if you've made changes or improvements and if you haven't then you site may become black listed and never crawled again, and you don't want this. Basically, if you bots can't crawl your site and index it properly, you're done. If they don't index it properly that means people won't find your site and ultimately you're creating content for people and using search engines as tools of the trade.
   

There are many other mistakes new SEOs make on a daily basis but if you watch out for the above top 5 SEO mistakes you will raise the chances of you gaining higher rankings with search engines, thus raising your chances of larger traffic gains and a bigger readership. Good luck and feel free to comment, just don't spam, that is the unwritten mistake number six.