A little background…

Recently I was in the interesting position where plugin I had always used started giving me some hassles.

For basic SEO functionality my go to install is the Yoast SEO plugin as it gives me the basic features I need and comes highly rated on WordPress.org. For my first client of the year I installed the plugin and found that it gave me an issue when attempting to use the theme’s built in page builder, namely I couldn’t access it. A quick Chrome inspector session revealed a JavaScript error/conflict of some sort. Disabling the plugin caused the issue to go away.

Now normally I would simply contact either the theme developer or the plugin developer and see who was at fault. In this case I asked around and it seems there was some issue with the plugin and the theme I was using. Not prepared to change themes at this point in development I looked into an alternate SEO plugin and came across the All in One SEO Pack from Semper Plugins. A quick install later and all was well.

Now to the point of this introduction. As part of the free version of the plugin I was able to subscribe to their newsletter to receive updates and download a free SEO Tips ebook. As someone who is always keen to improve my knowledge I downloaded the book for future reading. While the books contents are valuable, my favourite part were a list of ‘5 SEO Mistakes to Avoid’.

Whether you’ve been optimizing your web pages for quite some time or are new to the strategy, everyone makes mistakes. While the bad news is that these mistakes can have a significant effect on your page ranking, the good news is, they’re reversible. Here are five SEO mistakes to avoid (And if you’ve already made them, not to worry, you can make changes and move forward with your SEO strategy).

SEO Mistake #1:

Not using keywords correctly. Many webmasters are concerned about being banned from the search engines for keyword spamming or stuffing so they limit the use of keywords on their web pages. As long as your content sounds natural and reads easily, the chances are you have not overused your keywords. Make sure your keywords are included in the first and last paragraphs, in your headings and in your title and meta tags.

SEO Mistake #2:

Trying to fool search engine spiders. Search engines are a lot more sophisticated than most of us realize. They recognize – and penalize – hidden text, keyword spamming, and cloaking, which is showing different content to the search engine spiders than to your visitors. All of these practices only serve to hurt your page ranking and can in fact cause your website to be banned by the search engines, which means no one will find you – and no traffic means no profits.

SEO Mistake #3:

Using Flash Flash is a great presentation tool and can be dramatic and effective if used sparingly. It’s particularly appropriate if you have a media related website and want to demonstrate your industry savvy. However for most website owners it’s just not necessary and can harm your page ranking. Search engine spiders cannot read content embedded in Flash files, which means they’re not recognized or indexed.

SEO Mistake #4:

Using Your Company Name (and Only Your Company Name) As a Title Tag Unless you’re branding your company name, your company name shouldn’t be the only element in your title tag. Feel free to include it, however it’s also important to use your primary keyword for each webpage title tag. This is more useful for your customers and helps the search engines identify the various pages on your site.

SEO Mistake #5:

Using A Splash Page A splash page is a web page with a large graphic or company logo, and a link to enter the site. This is an ineffective strategy for a number of reasons:

• No keyword rich text on the page, nothing for the spiders to index.
• Only one internal link on the page
• These pages often have a redirect which often causes spiders to ignore them

If search engine optimization is important to your business, you may need to forgo the splash page. Your home page should be easy to navigate, content rich, and link visitors and spiders to other main web pages. In general, unless you’re trying to outsmart the search engines and using nefarious tactics, the majority of search engine mistakes are reversible. If you’ve committed a few of these mistakes, simply correcting them can increase your page ranking almost immediately. Take some time to evaluate your SEO strategy and eliminate these SEO mistakes.

Often I come across sites that break these rules and quite a few of them are also not recommended web practices but until now I didn’t realise their impact on SEO. Really valuable information for web owners and developers.

I liked Semper Plugins SEO plugin so much, as well as the information in the ebook, that I signed up as an affiliate for the pro version of their plugin. If you are in the market for a premium SEO plugin, I highly recommend All in One SEO Pro.