5 Fatal Website Mistakes and How To Avoid Them

Posted on December 11, 2011 by Nick Wilson

Fatal Mistakes Reviewing websites for search engine visibility is a common practice for SEO Professionals. We scrupulously interrogate websites to maximize their potential, we look at the link structure, keyword density, meta tags, image quality, etc.. After reviewing countless websites through user requests and forums, I decided to post a simple article explaining the most common mistakes I see that often brings a site to it’s knees.

Top 5 Website SEO Mistakes

Flash Intro’s: Flash Introductions or Flash Pages are animated Adobe Flash graphics that preload your actual website. Flash intro’s were widely used for a short span of time, they were great eye candy and sometimes brought a little traffic. Shortly after the popularity wave of the introduction page it was black listed by search engines, this quickly became the fastest and most efficient way to make sure your websites goes no where. While the intro may be excellently coded and look phenomenal, search engines don’t read flash pages so its just extra load time and makes the user wait for the content they intended to view in the first place.
Home Page Called “Home”: The <title> tag is a specific tag that is used to define your websites main text for a web browser, these are mainly used by search engines for index listings. This is arguably the most important part of your website keywords for ranking among search engines, so its important to get it right. Many default website designs and DIY designers place the <title> tag as “Home” by default. Most webmasters forget to change that default tag and leave it as “Home”, I see this far to often and it makes me laugh a little. So unless you want your users to search for the keyword “Home“, I suggest you make the title tag correct.
To Much or To Little Text: A classic newbie mistake for websites is the “Great Wall of Text“. These are websites that are often meant to be informative or attempting to abide by the keyword/character ratio that search engines require. It’s fairly common to see a 1000 word home page with about 20 keywords attempting to be targeted, my usual response to these walls of text is the “Back Button”.
To Many Pictures: This really only applies to Gallery websites but it can happen to any page or website. It follows the same rules as the wall of text, to many images and not enough text can cause a red flag. For Galleries you need to make a caption or description for each picture your displaying to even out the text/picture ratio that search engines require. For basic websites making gallery posts, the same things applies about 150-300 characters per picture is the minimum for any page or post.
Ad Clutter: These are very spammy, easy to spot mistakes, usually made by affiliate marketing websites. Both side bars covered in ONLY ads makes for worst possible search engine optimization (SEO). By taking up your side bars you limit your Inner-Linking and rank/authority distribution throughout the website. You also cripple the look of your site at the same time, which decreases the user experience. If your “Images” are really ads then you’ve entered a whole other problem because now you have a wall of text with no actual image

Nick Wilson is the owner, primary moderator, and main writer for SEO Journalist, which provides daily articles on website SEO and SMO performance. He is an experienced and versatile, professional SEO Consultant and Internet Marketer.