Top 10 SEO Mistakes

[Steve Smith]

Top 10 SEO Mistakes:

1. Targeting Keywords Based on Traffic and not Conversion Rate: More and more, untargeted keywords lead to low conversion rates. Driving traffic without measuring conversion rates is a mistake many people make. It is easy to cheaply generate traffic based on keywords that do not lead to conversions, which leads to a site with lots of useless visitors. Make sure to use an analytics package that can measure the true value of a search engine referral.

2. A Flash website: Flash is not read by search engines. If your site contains a great deal of Flash that contains keywords, you should create HTML equivalents.

3. Having Keywords in Images: The text in an image is not read by search engines. Since many sites have their primary keywords in the main banner, they are not being indexed by search engines. The ALT attribute of the image tag can help with this, but it is better to have your keywords in text.

4. Ignoring the Title tag: Search engines use the <title> tag to determine ranking. Leaving the <title> tag empty is common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your <title> tag shows in the search results as your page title.

5. Using JavaScript to Display Content: Search engines do not read content rendered by JavaScript. If your site relies on JavaScript to render content, such as with many CMS systems, it will not be indexed.

6. Using JavaScript to Display Links: Like the previous issue, search engines do not follow links generated by JavaScript. If you must use JavaScript menus, you should build a sitemap so that all your links will be visible to search engines.

7. Concentrating too much on meta tags: Meta tags are not as important to search engines as they used to be. They are still a step in SEO, but other items are far more important.

8. Non-Relevant Backlinks: Google has stated that it uses an algorithm to rate backlinks for quality. Non-relevant backlinks are ignored, and some experts believe may actually harm ranking. Do not resort to submitting to link farms, forums or newsgroups. Instead, get quality backlinks from sites that are complementary to yours.

9. Keyword Stuffing:This is the practice of using too many instances of a keyword without any context to increase keyword density. A few years ago, this actually worked, but these days your site is likely to be delisted from search engines.

10. Hidden Text: Using hidden text (done by making text color the same or very similar to the color of the background) is just as bad and usually goes along with keyword stuffing.

[AthenBoyle]

I do not agree with your point # 8. I know SEO guys who claimed that they got success only with irrelevant backlinks ( irrelevant backlinks = backlinks from the websites which theme is not exactly same as the website which are being target to improve ranks). That seems true, as I had read on some other forums there are people claimed it. But, people who applies black-hat/spammy methods always failed.

Also, I would like to add up one more mistake :
There are people who add links using their main keyword as anchor text, but it led to penalty from Google these days after Google's Panda/Penguin updates.

[Peter17]

I would like add here as below:
Wrong Redirects
Meta Keywords are Irrelevant
On-Page "Black Hat" Techniques
Not Using ALT Tag for Images
Using Flash or Splash Pages
Use Session IDs on Your URLs