When you first start out playing the game of SEO and getting your site listed on all the major search engines, you’ll be thrilled to see your name in lights at all…but who really looks to the forty-fifth page of search results? Now that you’re listed and are getting some traffic through your site, it’s time to grab Google by its horns and make the most of ranking technologies to drive your website to the top of the lists. This is an ongoing process as the web and SEO evolves constantly, so is it wise to adopt a DIY approach to your main asset – your website? Here are some of the common mistakes made by DIY SEO enthusiasts..

1. Falling for Link Lust

The race to get the most links is one where the turtle always wins. One of the most common mistakes made by people starting out with SEO is thinking that the more links they get, the better. While Google does rank sites with more inbound links higher, it isn’t just about numbers. The sites that link to you need to be full of relevant information and similar keywords. Look for quality over quantity when it comes to your link exchanges.

Cloaking links in a title that uses the right keywords for your page ranking purposes will get you nowhere in the long term - the technology of search engines is so smart these days that it picks up on the relevance of your links. Invisible text and bad links are not effective way to win the ranking race.

2. Mega Meta Tags

It might seem friendly to invite in your website visitors with a chummy, “Welcome to our website” as the title tag headlining their internet browser. While it may be logical to title your main page “Main Page” or “Home Page”, this is unwittingly worthless when it comes to accelerating your traffic and pushing up your page rank status. This is a precious keyword resource as it is also the text that appears as the link to your site in search results.

Many people focus so intently on the content of their website and perfecting keywords that they overlook the power of the meta tag totally. You can control what appears up in the title simply by including the html < META name="Keyworded Title of Site" content="Concise keyword-rich description of business services">, turning your listing in Google into a targeted and enticing ad to encourage the user to visit.

3. Concentrated Content

People need to see, when they do click through, that the content is relevant to their search. The meta tags are a great starting point to get clients clicking, but it’s going to be your content that keeps people looking, leading to buying. The continued relevance of the content throughout the entire website is vital to your PageRank placing, so you need to keep mentioning your keywords evenly throughout content.

4. The Advantage of Alt Tags

An easy way to optimise your performance in search engines that many amateurs overlook is to use alt tags. You can tag your images with simple html to load even more relevant keywords into your website. With your chocolate cake company using <image src=“chocolatecake.jpg” alt=”fresh chocolate cake delivered within the Brisbane CBD area”>. As always, keep the keywords as relevant as possible. Good use of keywords in your alt tags can also help your images to appear when users search images in Google. Imagine every time someone searched for a cool chocolate cake image that your site was offered? Some very successful sites get a large proportion of their traffic from image searches, this way.

5. Keyword Stuffing

A good keyword is like an easter egg, delicious and satisfying, attracting eager friends who want a bite. The kid who stuffs his face is going to get sick, and then be sorry that he ate them all at once. Commonly spread around the net is the misinformation that the more keywords you can load your page with, the better.

Writing “purebred Burmese pedigree” in to every single sentence on your cat breeding page may skyrocket you to the top of Google’s lists overnight, but your page won’t make good reading for the customer. A good guideline is to not repeat your key phrases in more than half the sentences, or more than 10 times on a page. If you really go overboard with keyword stuffing, for example including paragraphs consisting of nothing more than keywords, Google may come down with its iron fist and remove you from their index. Remember to prioritise your headings and subheadings as they count more than the body of text to spiders crawling your page.

6. Black Hat Techniques

Google has very clear Webmaster Guidelines on how they recommend webmasters optimise websites in order to rank well. Webmasters who choose to work outrside these guidelines are known as ‘black hats’and are willing to risk being penalised by Google for the short-term gains achieved through trickery. Rather than genuine links and coherent inclusion of keywords forcussed on providing the best experience for the reader, these ‘black hats’ spam pages with a cacophony of keywords and cloak links, hiding invisible text within the page. While these techniques may get you to the top of the list quickly, they can send you to the bottom just as quick. Once penalised, you risk missing out on the 86% of online consumers using search engines (according to MediaMetrix). Longevity in your high search engine ranking will really help to grow your business. Wearing a ‘white hat’ and abiding by the Google’s rules resists the dreaded possibility of being banned. Save the tricky stuff for post-work poker, and play safe when it comes to SEO.

7. Keeping up with Google

Once you get over basking in the initial glory of getting a decent ranking, don’t rest on your laurels just yet. The web changes at supersonic speed, and you need to update and maintain your website just as rapidly to keep your page ranking right up there. Continually “Google yourself”, searching for your site a couple of times a week to check on your rating. What worked on Google last month may have since evolved, so you have to keep up to date. A good way to follow trends and stay ahead of the game is to subscribe to feeds of SEO related blogs.

• Matt Cutts’ blog is the writings of a Google engineer responsible for identifying black hat tricks, so following his latest discoveries is a surefire way to keep your site kosher. www.mattcutts.com/blog
• The PlanetDomain Blog offers advice and opinion on a wide range of related topics and comments on current SEO trends.

8. Ignoring URLs

It’s not just the titles, tags and keywords that count towards your search engine ranking. To really make the most of how to spiders crawl, you need to think about every single page and their address on your site. Try to make each page reflect in its URL exactly what it does using keywords, ie caradvice.com/tips-on-changing-tyres.htm will rank you higher than caradvice.com/tyres1.htm.

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