Are you trying to do everything you can to rank your website well with the search engines? How come you’re not seeing any results then? Many new webmasters who try to optimize their site for the search engines forget the basic rules that they need to keep in mind. Search engine rules are always evolving and the ways to optimize your sites are being altered as well. If you’re looking to beat out everyone you’re competing against and Google’s initial page is what you’re hoping for, the mistakes you’re about to learn about must be avoided. If you do this, you will achieve much more and it won’t matter how much money you put into it.

Graphic-Heavy Website

The most common SEO mistake made by new webmasters is that they try to use a lot of flash on their website. Even though flash gives your website the “coolness” factor, it’s not really recommended when you’re doing SEO. Flash may help you with the visitors to your website, but search engines can’t see it and therefore it can’t be seen by the spiders.

If you want to get seen by the search engine spiders, you must have content on your site as that’s what they look for. This will affect your rankings. Flash makes your website look good, so if you don’t want to avoid it completely, you should add some text and graphics to your page so that you can optimize it for the search engines. You have to have a lot of text if you want to rank high.

Using the Wrong Keywords

Choosing the wrong keywords is another mistake that webmasters make. If you don’t research your keywords well enough and don’t have a strong keyword list, it spoils your optimization efforts. You can’t sell anything to visitors who aren’t even interested in what you have to offer. Apart from that, choosing keywords that people aren’t searching for doesn’t really make sense. You have to learn to do keyword research correctly because without it the rest of your SEO efforts will not hold up. The key is to locate lower competition keywords and to build your content around them. And the best part is that there are free keyword tools that will show you keywords that you can use.

SEO Guidelines

This is why it’s necessary to memorize those guidelines so that you can avoid any mistakes that will get you banned from the searches. The search engines are always changing their criteria so make sure you’re always updated so that you avoid penalties. For instance, when we look at Google, we see it changing its search engine algorithm on a regular basis, so if you don’t go by their rules, your ranking will probably fall. In conclusion, successful SEO is a combination of multiple elements. Blackhat techniques may offer instant solutions to get your site ranked and bring in the traffic, but none of these are long term. Focus on the more reliable Whitehat SEO methods that will bring you targeted traffic and improved search engine results for the long term and won’t get you banned.