Top SEO Mistakes

1. No Targetted Keywords or Targetting the wrong keywords
Many SEOs do this bluder by selecting not so useful, non-relevant or even wrong keywords and key phrases for optimizing the website pages. They might choose keywords according to their mind that are descriptive of the website but the normal users may not search those terms. Choosing the right keywords can bring success or failure to your SEO campaign. Irrespective of your resources, you can't think on your own of all the useful keywords but a good keyword
suggestion tool will definitely help you find keywords that are useful for your website. Also region specific keywords play important role in bringing quality visitors to the website.

2. Ignoring the Title tag
Leaving the title tag empty or not using it properly is also a big mistake. Title tag is one of the most important place to have useful and relevant keywords of your website, it help you in optimization and the text in your title tag shows in the SERPs (search engine result pages) as your page title.

3. Concentrating only on Meta Tags
Many professionals think SEO is only about putting keywords in your meta description & keywords tags. They must know that meta tags does not have enough weightage on search engines. They can create meta description and keywords tag with useful keywords but should not expect much to rank well only because of these meta tags.

4. A Flash Website without a HTML Alternative
Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it.

5. JavaScript Menus
Using JavaScript for navigation within the website is not bad as long as you understand that search engine spiders can't read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. Hence if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should create simple HTML and XML sitemap putting all the page links, so that all your pages will be crawlable to the search engine spiders.

6. Using only Images for Headings
Many programmers use images in place of text due to the thinking that an image looks better than simple text for headings and menus. Although images can make your website look more attractive & distinctive but in SEO terms images for headings and menus are a big mistake because H1, H2 header tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you don't want to have your text within H1, H2 header tags due to their visibility, you can modify them through a stylesheet.

7. Ignoring Keyword Rich URLs
Many SEOs underestimate the importance of a good URL. Dynamic page names are still very frequent in use and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Although it is possible to rank high even without keywords in URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL of the domain and file names (inner pages, images, etc), result in an additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN & Yahoo! but Google also give weightage to them, hence it is very useful to use keywords in URLs.

8. Backlink Spamming
It is seen as a very common practice to acquire large number of backlinks for the website due to a delusion that more backlinks are always better and for which many SEOs try to get links with any hook n crook, they may resort to link farms, forums or newgroups spam etc., which can lead to getting their website banned. You need to have quality backlinks for your website only through ethical techniques.

9. Lack of Consistency and SEO Maintenance
SEO never been a one time process. People who believe that once they optimize a site, it is done forever are living in a wrong belief. If you want to permanently optimize your website, you have to keep on analysing your competition and changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines and update your website pages.

10. Lack of Keywords in the Page Content
If the content on the page does not have sufficient keywords then you must modify your content according to the requirement and place the useful and relevant keywords at the sensible place within the text. Also it is better to make the most useful keywords bold or highlight them.