by Mouhcine Azizoun

Created on: September 18, 2010   Last Updated: December 02, 2010

There are many SEO mistakes that can hurt your PageRank.   This article is not about all of the mistakes.  It is about the most commonly occurring ones.  More often than not, these mistakes are made by novices because they misjudge the importance of certain factors.  The ranking factors that beginners tend to belittle are usually keyword research, title tags, Meta tags, the design of the website, URLs, quality backlinks, keyword density, keyword frequency and keyword prominence.

Keyword Research

The generality of beginners underestimate the importance of keyword research.  They just brainstorm some keywords that are related to their niche markets without researching their SEO effectiveness.  The by-product is always poor SEO keywords that generate no traffic.

Brainstorming keywords is just the first stage of keyword research.  All keywords must go through a four-step elimination process to check their SEO usefulness. 

First step: check Traffic

Second step: check relevance

Third step: check the competition

Fourth step: check commerciality

Title Tags

The title tag is the name you give to a web page.  It tells the search engines what the page is about.  Beginners tend to skip this step, which is a flagrant mistake. Imagine that your computer files do not have names.  They just have numbers like 1, 2, 3, etc.  Suppose you need to check one of the files.  How would you find it?  I am certain that you can imagine the hassle you would go through while trying to find it.

The search engines would face the same problem if the title tag does not exist.  Your website is considered worthless if the search engines spiders cannot crawl it easily.

Meta Tags

The Meta tag is the description you give to your pages.  It appears under the links you see when you conduct searches.  The mistakes novices make are:

1)  Not writing the Meta tag.

2)  Stuffing the Meta tag with keywords.

3)  Using the same Meta tag for all pages.

4)  Not positioning the main (most important) keywords at the beginning of the Meta tag.

5)  Using keywords that are not mentioned in the content page.

Websites Design

Having a flash website is the worst SEO mistake you can make.  The search engine spiders cannot read content on a flash website, which means it cannot be indexed.

The main reason why beginners use flash websites is because they are attractive.  If you are bound and determined

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