Are you making these SEO mistakes? Listed below are SEO mistakes that many webmaster still deploy today. It’s why some domains that are more than 4 years old have no keyword relevance and a low Google Pagerank.

Splash Page

You need to serve up your homepage and avoid this old design flaw. I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Clíck here to enter” on their homepage.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders.

Lose the Flash and Ajax

If you’re looking to improve SEO, than lose the flash for navigation menus or other elements on your website. Flash can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed. Flash looks cool, but not when it comes to SEO. Ajax is another unfriendly SEO technology. Why is this a mistake? Because, ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

“Click Here” or “Read More” Link Anchor Text

I make this mistake a lot, but on purpose, well at least I admit it. Many people use “Clíck here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But, if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, then use, that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Exceeding the 65 Character Limit

Many bloggers write very long post titles. This is an issue in search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cut off.

Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always provide a description (Keep it short) for your images using the alt attribute. Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Tip: Describing your images correctly can improve your ranking in the image search results.

Unfriendly URLs

Most blog platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in (Permalinks), but not every blog owner is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your visitors and the search engines. It describes what the article is about just from the friendly URL. Do not forget to add your keywords in the URL.

Example:

Friendly URL – https://www.techjaws.com/google-pagerank-update-comes-early/
Non-Friendly URL – https://www.techjaws.com/?p=12356

If you’re using WordPress, go to your wp-admin console and click on the Permalinks. Select Custom Structure and enter the following: /%postname%/.

You should now have friendly URLs.

If you have other SEO mistakes you would like to share, please leave a comment here.