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Many times clients come to me looking for advice on how to get their website ranked better in the search engines. Usually when I review their websites, I find many of the same problems for each client. In this top ten list, I have focused on the mistakes I found within the website. SEO work can be broken up into two parts, on-site and off-site. On-site optimization are changes made to the structure of the website and the content and linking internal to the website. Off-site refers to what you are doing outside of your website to drive more traffic back to your website. Much of this is related to how other sites are linking to you and what text they are using in the link. I’ll create a post later this week highlighting some of the things to consider for off-site optimization, but first let’s get into the top ten mistakes.

1. Not using keywords in the Title of your web pages. Many times small businesses will simply use the name of their business in the title of the page. This is not how people are trying to find you. A good example of this is Ace Plumbing of Saint Joseph, Michigan. A better title would be Ace Plumbing - Your Choice For Plumbing, Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Service in Saint Joseph, Michigan.
2. Not using keywords effectively in your URL in the address bar for each of your pages. A good example of this is: http://www.fishingcairns.com.au/page6-1.html. By looking at that url, you have no idea what page6-1.html is about. This page is actually about fishing knots and knot tying. A better page name would be fishing-knots-and-knot-tying.html.
3. Over optimizing your pages for a single keyword. The days of keyword stuffing a page and ranking high are over. There are still plenty of offshaore writers that will write “Optimized Articles” for you, but you will no longer ranked well for a page written completely based on keyword density. In a comment I posted recently on Pam Hoffman’s Seminar Listing Service, I mentioned LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing and the changes that have happened at each of the major search engines. When building content for your site, you now need to focus on creating content for multiple related keywords. Keywords that would normally appear togethor. As Google says in their webmaster recommendations build your pages for human visitors not search bots. I agrea with that to an extent, but I still write content with the search engines in mind. To get a idea of LSI related keywords, you can search within Google with a ~ modifier like ~”pets”. This will bring up search results with keywords related to pets in bold in the search results. Another way is to watch the related searches in Google when you do a search. They will appear at the bottom of the search and will give you more terms to include when creating your content.
4. Using Flash. Building your entire site in Flash can be a big mistake unless you are able to get a lot of inbound link to let the search engines know what your site is about. Search engine spider can not spider the content contained in flash, yet. You are also not advised to supply one version of the page with flash to your human visitors and a second version of the page without flash to search engine spiders.
5. Using frames. Like Flash, frames make it very hard for search engine spiders to navigate and find all the pages of your site. Usually the framed site I have seen also use the same title for every page of the site, another common problem.
6. Not using H1, H2, H3 tags. There will probably be some debate over this, but in my experience this still has a big impact. Using H1, H2, and H3 tags to format the titles of important sections of your site along with keywords in these section titles help optimize your pages for those keywords.
7. Not including Alt tags for your images. All of the images on your site should have an alt tag describing what the images are about for vision impaired visitors. Hopefully, the images are also related to the keywords you are trying to optimize for since the alt tag test is also spidered by the search engines.
8. Linking all of your pages to one another. This came up down in Vegas during Bruce Safran’s presentation. When building content sites, you want to group your content in distinct categories. If I was creating a site on Pets, I may choose, Dogs, Cats, Rabbits, and Fish. Then within each of those vertical markets, I would drilldown into the various breeds and species within those groups. The linking would then follow a pattern such that articles within the Dog category do not link to the Cat category. An example would be Dogs->Boxer->Boxer1->Boxer2->Boxer3->Dachshund->Dachshund1->Dachshund2->Maltese->Maltese1->Maltese2->Cats->Persian->Persian1->Persian2->Siamese->Siamese1->Siamese2. It may not be obvious, but if you follow it, you will see only the last dog article links to the Cat category. The same would follow linking Cats articles to Rabbits and then Rabbits to Fish.
   
9. Not including Privacy, Terms Of Service and Contact Us pages. Google is looking for these pages within their SERPs as well as in Adwords landing pages to show the Quality of a site. The quality of a site is becoming more and more a factor on how it ranks with in the search engines.
10. Not doing enough keyword reasearch. Many times clients will be trying to get ranked for keyphrases they think people are using to search for them, but in fact the keywords they choose are getting very little searches at all or they are not targeted toward the action they want the visitor to take when they reach their site. The keyword tools I use the most these days are on SEOBook.com.

I hope these mistakes shed some light on mistakes you may have on your website. They are all really easy to fix once you know what they are. If you would like a free 30 minute consultation on your website and business, you can fill out the form at GurusForHire.com. Don’t forget to include your phone number in the form, for your consultation.

Kevin