If you are trying to optimize your website for the search engines it can be very easy to make mistakes, especially if you are new to SEO. I think the easiest way to learn how to optimize your website properly is to look at some common seo mistakes and learn from them. It is always much easier to avoid making mistakes when you know what the most common mistakes are!

1) Ignoring the TITLE Tag
Leaving out your title tag is another common mistake that is also made by the experts. This is the most important area of your SEO to have your keyword. This will show up as the title of your website in the search engines.

2) Using a Flash Website that Does Not Contain HTML
A flash website may appear appealing to you but it is not always appealing to users and search engines cannot always rank them properly. If you still prefer to use a flash website be sure that you include an HTML version of the site.

3) Concentrating Too Much on Meta Tags
Apart from the description meta tag, most search engines pretty much ignore the meta tags. They have been abused in the past and are no longer a reliable way of ranking websites. I see too many people get hung up on their “meta keywords” tag when they should be concentrating on the content of their site and the backlinks.

4) Using Java Script Menus
Search engines do not recognize Java Scripts so you should not use these as the sole method of navigation.  If you do happen to have certain portions of your website that do contain Java Script be sure to create a site map as well to allow the search engines to index all your pages.

5) Not Mentioning Your Keywords Enough
I’ve seen many people try to optimize a web page and only mention the keyword in the TITLE and in the meta tags. You must mention the keyword in the body of the page as well – a few times including at the beginning, middle and end of the page is good, but be careful not to overdo it.

6) Ignoring Your URLs
When you create additional pages on your site be sure to use the target keywords for that page in the filename.

7) Targeting the Wrong Keywords
This is the one of the most common SEO mistakes. Before you decide on your keywords be sure to do some research so you can be sure that people are actually searching on these keywords AND they convert well. Also check out the competition and make sure you have a chance of ranking on the first page of the search engines.

Hopefully you can learn from some of these common SEO mistakes and get your site ranked well in the search engines!

You may or may not have heard of Black Hat SEO, but it is important to understand a bit about this so you can be sure to steer clear of Black Hat SEO Tricks and avoid your website being penalized!

Black hat SEO is an unethical way for a webmaster to get their website to appear higher in the  search engine results (SERPS) than it really should. This may sound like a good thing to you, but in almost all cases, this higher rank in the search engines will be a temporary thing, and the website will very often end up in a much worse position in the long term (or perhaps be completely removed from the SERPS)

These black hat SEO tricks will usually have some of the following characteristics.

• It will break search engine rules and regulations.
• It will unethically present content in both visual and non visual to the search engine web crawlers.
• It will create a bad user experience.

Penalties for using black hat SEO tricks can be extremely harsh and include but not limited to banning from all search engines. There are ways to avoid creating a black hat website and if you follow them correctly will save you a lot of problems in the future.

1. Do not stuff your keywords

Using a lot of keywords in your site and nothing else will get you in hot water with the search engines. You need to learn how to place your keywords properly to avoid this. If you fluff your articles with a lot of keywords yes, it will increase your chances of ranking higher on the search engine but only temporarily.

2. Avoid using invisible text

Invisible text consists of putting keywords into your site where the text is the same color as the background e.g. white text with a white background. This text is hidden from the customer but can be detected by the search engine crawlers.

3. Avoid Cloaking

Cloaking means that you show one page to the search engines and a completely different one to your visitors. One example of doing this is by using the “iframe” code within your page.

4. Do not use doorway pages

A doorway page is literally just a fake page that is used to attract the web crawlers. The customers themselves will never see this page. This doorway will trick the web crawler to rank your business higher but again, this will only be temporary.

If you wish to run a legitimate business you need to avoid black hat SEO techniques  because they will taint your company in the long run. Run your business right and do not fall into the unethical practice of running a black hat SEO website.

In this post I’m going to talk a bit about social bookmarking and SEO. A lot of people ask me whether or not social bookmarking can help your search engine rankings and the answer to this question is “yes”, but only if you do it correctly.

Social bookmarking is defined by Wikipedia as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet. If you have ever posted your link to one of your blog articles with Digg you have social bookmarked it.

Social Bookmarking has a number of SEO advantages:

• You may get a backlink when you bookmark a page on your site (I say “may” because some bookmarking sites use “nofollow” in their backlinks).
• Bookmarking a new page or a new blog post on your site can help get that page indexed in the search engines quickly.
• Most social bookmarking sites allow you to use tags. You can list your target keywords in these tags and this can help your ranking for these keywords

It is very easy to bookmark your blog articles or web pages to multiple social directories with one click. For example OnlyWire  allows you to join numerous social directories and then bookmark your blog article by logging into your account and posting your title, description and tag keywords. SocialMarker is a similar site, buty with a higher number of social bookmarking sites listed. It also allows you to choose between sites that use “nofollow” and don’t use “nofollow”

When you write a new blog article or web page and bookmark it you can also help yourself out by utilizing some basic SEO techniques.

To keep it simple what you want to do is choose a specific keyword phrase for the article you write about. If you target longtail keyword phrases, which are phrases of three or more words, you increase the odds of ranking higher on the search engines as these longer keyword phrases tend to be less competitive.

The easy way to set this up is to include your keyword phrase in the title of your blog post. You should then also include it in the first and last paragraphs of the article before you publish it.

When you go to bookmark the article you want to tag it around that keyword phrase. You should include those again in the title and in the description for additional emphasis.

Search engines spider large social sites such as Technorati, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Simpy and others multiple times per day. By bookmarking your article in these directories you are creating valuable back links to the new pages on your site and you have a chance of receiving visitors from these social sites (expecially if your post is interesting or controversial and other people bookmark it).

If you follow these tips for social bookmarking and SEO you will see a greater return for your efforts in terms of search engine rankings and traffic.

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Once you have done your keyword research and chosen your keywords carefully, the next stage in achieving a higher search engine rank is optimizing your website.

For maximum traffic you should aim to optimize each page on your website for a different keyword phrase and you should make sure that the keyword phrase that you pick for your home page or the main page of your website gets a good number of searches per month.

Here are the main places on a web page that you should put your keywords when you are optimizing your website:

• In the <TITLE> tags – this is the text that is displayed along the title bar of your browser
• In the Headline tags - especially the <H1> tag
• In the ALT attributes of images – mention your keywords in one or two of the alt attributes of any of the images on your page
• Through out the body of your web page – ensuring that your keywords are mentioned at the beginning, middle and end
• In the anchor text of links – if you have any links to this page elsewhere on your website try to make sure that the anchor text (clickable text) has your keywords in it.
• In the <META> tags – although the main search engines no longer use these tags for ranking, you may want to mention your keywords in the keywords tag and in the description tag. The description tag is used by Google and other search engines to display a summary of your site when it is displayed in the search engine results.

Optimizing your website doesn’t have to be a complicated process – just make sure you mention your keywords in all of these places. At the same time, don’t over do it as keyword spamming can have the opposite affect! 

Taking an extra 10 minutes to do this when creating a new website can mean the difference between lots of traffic and no traffic.

Remember when working on your SEO that it pays to spend a good amount of time concentrating on your home page and researching the keywords for it. However, you shouldn’t stop there…

Here is my strategy for multiplying my traffic. I get so much more traffic from my sub pages than I do from my home page.

At least once per week I do the following:

(1) Choose a topic

(2) Research keywords for that topic. I am currently using Wordtracker to shortlist my keywords and the Google keyword tool to check the search volume.

(3) Find a good keyword phrase. I want something that has at least a couple of hundred searches a month, but not too much competition. The keyword needs to be less competitive than the one for my home page.

(4) Create a page about that topic and include the keywords in the filename, the <TITLE>, the <H1> tag, throughout the body, in the alt attributes and so on. If you don’t know how to create a new page on your site, a blog post will do. Put the keywords in the blog title and 2-3 times throughout the blog post. Monetize the page with a link or information about your product or service, or at least one affiliate program, or adsense, or a newsletter optin.

(5) Link to that page from at least one other place on your site e.g. home page, blog or menu. I usually link from the home page and one of my sub menus.

(6) Social bookmark the page.

(7) Write an article about that same topic, but make it different from the page that you added. I post my article using Submit Your Article with article leverage. In half the resource boxes I use only a deep link to this new page and in the other half I include both a link to my home page and a deep link. I put my keywords in the anchor text too.

(8) Repeat for a new page…

This technique works better than trying to squeeze lots and lots of keywords into your home page.