Anyone who wants to develop a successful web site is well aware of the importance of search engine optimization (SEO).  But it’s easy to make mistakes, especially in the beginning stages, and on the internet, time moves too quickly to be wasted.  Here are some common mistakes which can be avoided with a little foreknowledge.

One major mistake is lack of keywords in the title elements.  Spiders generally only search the first 60 or so characters of a title.  If you don’t get to the point quickly, your site may not be found.  Another mistake in this area is keyword stuffing, including a large number of keywords over and over in the title, which may result in penalties and, ironically, a lower search engine ranking.

Another mistake is using the wrong keywords.  What may seem an obvious keyword to you may not be obvious to the searcher.  This might seem a particularly frustrating mistake – after all, who can think of every possible keyword permutation by themselves? – but using a good keyword suggestion tool can offer relief.  Wordtracker even offers a free online keyword suggestion tool for those with a limited budget, and Google offers the indispensable Google AdWords keyword tool.

A lack of keywords in the content can also be a problem.  Content needs to be, first and foremost, interesting and relevant.  Reading a barely-disguised advertisement stuffed with repetitive keywords gets old and insulting very quickly.  But utterly ignoring keywords will not lead to a higher page rank, either.

Using flash makes for an snazzy look, but too much flash usage on a site can hurt it.  Search engines are not able to index content or navigation embedded in a flash file, so if all you keywords are located in a sparkly splash screen, it’s not going to be good SEO.

These are easy mistakes to make, but also easy mistakes to avoid.  With just a little heads-up, you can steer clear of major SEO mistakes and start driving your site to the top of the search engines.