If you’re just starting out in SEO, then this article is a must-read... it will tell you the six most common ways you can damage your search engine rankings.

1. Keywords that aren’t right for your website
The most common mistake I see is choice of keywords on a website. Quite often people will target high-traffic keywords or keywords that are highly competitive, meaning their chance of ranking for them is unlikely. If you’re a caryard based on the northside of Sydney, then it’s pointless to try and rank for the term ‘car’. Your time would be better spent choosing long-tail keyword phrases such as ‘buy car Sydney northside’ or ‘caryard north Sydney’.

2. Insufficient content
Search engines regard unique and informative content as pure gold, hence the popular phrase used within the SEO community – “content is king”. A lot of website owners tend to focus on a graphics-intense website, often neglecting the need for quality content on their site. You must strive to give informative and interesting content to your readers.

3. Title tags not being used correctly
One of the most important on-page SEO techniques you can use throughout your website is the use of keywords in your title tags . (Check out this article for a more thorough explanation of title tags.) Keywords should always be placed within the text of your title tag, but it’s important not to ‘stuff’ the title tag with multiple variations of a keyword or keyword phrase – search engines do not like this, and it doesn’t send out a good message to your users.

It’s also not a good idea to use the same title tag on all pages within your website, as you will be pinged for duplicate content (more on duplicate content below).

4. Entire site built in Flash
Sites that are built entirely in Flash are no doubt visually appealing, but from a search engine’s point of view they aren't good. At present there is no possible way for a search engine’s crawlers to read content within a Flash site, as they are graphic images, not text. Google is working on ways around this issue... one of our readers recently asked the question "Does Google index Flash sites?" - you can find more detailed information here.

If you really want to use Flash on your site you can; you just have to be smart about it. Rather than have your entire site inside one Flash file, you can break up your pages into several Flash files that can be embedded within HTML files. This technique allows each page to have its own unique URL. Another way to get around this is to build a ‘ghost’ site which is built in HTML that can sit ‘behind’ your actual Flash site and can be crawled by the search engines.

5. Identical meta tags on every page
Each page of your website should contain unique text in the meta description and meta keyword areas. At the very least, if you leave this blank, the search engines will usually pick up content from your page. This option is much better than having a generic meta description for each page of your site.

6. Duplicate content
Each page of your website should have unique content, and should have unique title tags. You’ll also experience issues with duplicate content if your page has the same content on it as a page from another website. If you sell products of any kind you may come across this issue, as often the text on your page will be identical as the manufacturer’s page for a particular product. If you are copying content from a manufacturer’s site or other site, alter the text to suit your website, ensuring you have unique, original content.

For more detailed information on duplicate content, here's a link to our article What is duplicate content?.

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