Kenneth Dreyer blog

I’ve been working with SEO for quite a while now and have put together a list over what I think is the biggest mistakes most people do when their working with SEO. This list is based on my experience, so please feel free to comment it.

1. Not optimizing your title tag. This is the main reason why most of my clients don’t rank on the keywords they want to rank on when they come to me. Some of them even use the same title tag across the entire site. Write good titles and include your keywords.
2. Keyword density. It’s either too high or too low. I’ve had a client ask me why I didn’t show up in the rankings for a keyword and when I had a look at his site I couldn’t find the keyword once on his site.
3. Unique and good content. This is the single most important factor for a successfully site. You will never make it in the long run unless your site is good. You can rank good with a site containing crappy content, but trust me – it won’t last for long.
4. Old school blackhat tricks. White background and white text, Hidden text and similar tricks like this. It won’t keep you ranking in the long run. Google is getting smarter “everyday”, so don’t kid yourself trying to outsmart then. What would you rather do? Spend your time working out new schemes on how to avoid getting caught by Google or spent time working on quality content? The answer should be simple.
5. Bad internal linking. Is it easy to navigate around your site? Have you made sure all your most important sites have a link with a good anchor text from the front page of your domain? Is your menu build up in a good way? Make sure it’s easy to navigate around your site both for the users and crawlers. This also brings me to the next point in my list.
6. Not adding sitemap. Have a sitemap on your site. Its done wonders on all the site I’ve ever added it to. Link to the sitemap from the front site. (PS: Google doesn’t support more than 50 000 url’s per sitemap. If you have more than that, make several sitemaps).
7. Flash. It’s not really good for usability and most search engines won’t be able to read or index your content. You don’t want that happening (PS: There are no problems using flash for smaller parts of your site, like advertising etc).
8. Watch who you associate with. You don’t want to associate with bad neighbourhoods. Don’t get involved in link farming, buy links from crappy site, trade links with crappy sites or anything like that. Try to make sure the sites that are linking to you are relevant to the content of your site.
9. Frames. This is 2008. You should not be using frames anymore. Don’t even get my started on why!
10. Choosing the wrong SEO Company. Be careful what company you choose to take care of your SEO campaign. I’ve seen a company take out their whole client list just because they used techniques that didn’t apply with Google’s guidelines.

Now like I said in the beginning of the post. This list is based on my experience. I know there is a lot of talk about selling links and other stuff, but truth being told – I haven’t been punished for this stuff yet and neither has my clients. Some other of the more advanced blackhat stuff like cloaking is also probably pretty bad for your site, but I’ve never done it and neither have any of my clients, so it’s not in my list of bad SEO strategies. And obviously, blackhat SEO is bad for you.
Do you have any good or bad experiences to share?