Anyone who uses the internet knows who Google is and has probably used it before. If you have a website then Google is where you want it to appear. The internet holds more information than any other one of man’s inventions, so this calls for a complex yet easy to navigate structure. Search engines have achieved this and in the process have become one of the most important online resources for people. If you want people to find your site and visit it, then you should put in the effort to optimize it the right way. Seo or search engine optimization can attract unbelievable numbers of visitors to your site because if it is sitting on the first page then that means your site will potentially be seen thousands of people per day. Unfortunately, SEO is one of the fields where there is too much bad advice going around for someone who doesn’t know any better to be able to tell the difference. There are some common mistakes that many people make so we decided to discuss three of them here.
Slow Website
You will want to stay away from the first SEO mistake and that’s to stay away from too much flash. While a flash on a website may look neat, it doesn’t help you any with SEO. Flash is impressive to the people who visit your site, but search engines aren’t able to recognize it so it the bots won’t be able to crawl your site.
Poor Content
Content is what attracts the search engine spiders and when they don’t find it, they’ll simply skip your site and move on. You will get ranked higher if you do this. You can still have your flash as long as you use text also so that the search engines can find your site. If you add more text, your site will do better. The speed at which your site loads is also a factor, not only to your popularity with visitors, but also to how the search engines view your site. If your site contains a lot of code it can slow down your how your site loads, which could reduce your rankings with Google. Where possible, try to avoid internal code on your pages and use an external CSS file instead. This simple change to your code can improve loading times and give your site a more smooth loading process. Just keep in mind that search engines are looking out to give the best results to their users, and to convince them, you have to become the best. While it’s important to appease the search engine’s criteria, your site should also appeal to your visitors as well.
Another SEO issue to overcome is choosing a bad title and description, as these can reduce your overall search rankings. Search engines use the title and description to try and figure out which theme is predominant within your text content and then rank you accordingly. Compared to a few years ago, search engines and their algorithms for determining rankings have evolved, so pay attention to these elements.
Above all, make sure your don’t use too much flash on your site if you do include images, and use ALT tags when necessary. If you use the mistakes you just learned about, you’ll score higher in the ranks and you will never see yourself banished.