In this article, I’m going to document some important SEO mistakes that I came across. Visit this page regularly because I’m going to update it from time to time. Whenever I come across a new mistake that worth noting, I will list it here.

Simply avoiding these mistakes can drastically improve your search engine ranking.

Let’s start with the most common mistake of all……

1. Going after competitive keywords

General keywords are usually competitive keywords. If you do not conduct any form of keyword research, chances are you will think of keywords that are too general and hence too competitive.

For example, if a person runs an internet marketing related blog, he may want to optimize his blog for “make money online” (which has 149 million competing webpages!!). Someone running a Forex website may want to optimize his site for “forex trading” (which has 11 million competing webpages!!).

Aiming for competitive keywords with huge demand is not wrong, but it’s too ambitious. You may be building links like mad, but still wonder why you are not seeing any improvement in your search engine ranking.

The secret here is to go for keywords with some demand and low competition.

2. Optimizing for too many different keyword phrases per webpage

Don’t be overly ambitious and try to optimize too many keyword phrases for one webpage (including homepage).

For example, I’ve seen a marketer trying to optimize his homepage for “make money online fast”, “affiliate marketing for newbies” and “internet marketing strategies”.

Assuming the keywords have low competition “which I doubt so”, how is he going to include all these keywords into his title tag, which is an important factor in search engine optimization (Read SEO Tutorial Part 1 for details)?

The story will be different if he tries to optimize for “proven ways to make money online fast”, “ways to make money online”, “ways to make money online fast”, “make money online fast”. In this approach, it may seem that he is also trying to optimize many keyword phrases, but technically, all the keyword phrases are linked.

He can have a title tag of “proven ways to make money online fast”. For link building, he can start with “proven ways to make money online fast” and “ways to make money online fast”, which may be an easy target to shoot. Then he can challenge harder keywords such as “ways to make money online” and “make money online fast” and eventually “make money online”. The best part is, his link building effort will help to prove the ranking for all the keywords.

Let me share with you a real-life example. For LeadsLeap.com, our aim is to get to the top rank for “lead generation”. But we started with a longer keyword phrase of “free lead generation system”, and then slowly work our way up. When building links, we began with “free lead generation system”, then move on to “lead generation system” and then to “lead generation”. See the point?

As of today, we are in the first page for keywords like “free lead generation system”, “free lead generation”, “lead generation system” and even “free lead system”. We can optimize for several keywords at one time because they are all related, and we start with long tail keywords.

Lastly I want to emphasize that a website can be built to target unlimited keywords, but EACH webpage in a website, including the homepage, should only be built to target limited number of keywords, preferably linked keywords. If you have 2 keyword phrases that are totally different, you should prepare 2 articles and build 2 webpages for each of them.

3. Poor onpage optimization

This is usually a newbie’s mistake, where his webpage is not optimized for the keyword he is targeting. For example, the title tag may not include the keyword he is trying to optimize, or worse still the content doesn’t have the keyword at all. (Read SEO Tutorial Part 1 for details).

4. Dynamic links

You may want to note that search engines treat dynamic links as unique webpages.

For example, to Google,

http://domain.com/blog/?p=1 is one webpage;

http://domain.com/blog/?p=2 is another webpage.

This may seem obvious since default Wordpress links look like this, but not so obvious in some cases.

A typical scenario is when you want to track the click-through. For example, if you post an article in Ezinearticles and you want to track the click-through, your link may look like this:

http://domain.com/my-article.php?track=1234

To Google,

http://domain.com/my-article.php?track=1234 is one webpage;

http://domain.com/my-article.php is another webpage!!!!

So from link building standpoint, you are building links for http://domain.com/my-article.php?track=1234, not http://domain.com/my-article.php.

5. SEO unfriendly website structure

Lastly, you may want to note that what you see on your webpage may not be what the search engine spider sees.

Case 1 – iframe

Some webpages are built using iframe. Without going into the details, iframe is simply a html code that allows a webpage to show contents from one or more webpages.

For example, webpage A may be full of contents, but if you view the source code, you can only see two links, one to webpage B and one to webpage C. What you see in webpage A is actually contents from B and C. To search engine spiders, webpage A has no content!

Case 2 – javascript

Similarly, some webpages may be drawing contents through javascripts. To site visitors, the webpage is full of content, but if you look at the source code, the webpage is just a bunch of javascript codes.

This is common in some plug and play systems, where you are promised to have instant online store or instant website, but those kinds of websites are only good for advertisement-generated traffic. They cannot be optimized for search engine traffic at all! Be careful when you buy into such a system.

Case 3 – excessive use of Wordpress plugins

For those of you who have your own self-hosted Wordpress blog, you will know that the market has tons of plugins that you can use on your blog, and some of them claim to boost your search engine ranking.

My advice is, know your fundamentals well before using them.

I have seen a blog with 2 different title tags, 2 different meta descriptions and 2 different meta keywords for every webpage. I believe they are generated by different plugins. The blogger may have installed 2 SEO plugins and both are trying to “optimize” the page.

I have also seen a blog with an “index,follow” meta tag and a “noindex,nofollow” meta tag, both on the same page! No one in his right mind will do that, but it can be possible if you use different kinds of plugins that work independently from each other to achieve different objectives.

Ok, that’s all for today. I’ll continue to add more common SEO mistakes when I come across them.

Next week, in Part 3 of our SEO tutorial series, I’m going to discuss ALL ABOUT LINK BUILDING.

If you have any questions or doubt about link building, post them below before next Friday. I will try to cover them in the next post.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to establish a free SEO tutorial series in our blog. Today is part 1 of the SEO tutorial. I hope this free tutorial series will give you a clear idea how to get your website rank top in Google search engine.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Practicing SEO means getting your website to rank top in the organic search engine result for a particular keyword phrase so as to get endless flow of free traffic to your website.

Imagine if you sell gifts, and you rank #1 in Google’s search result for “buy cheap Christmas presents”. What can that do to your sales?

Different search engines have different search algorithm. In the SEO industry, we are mainly concerned about getting top ranking in Google because Googles owns more than 80% of the search engine market share.

Who am I to teach SEO?

If you are new to this blog or LeadsLeap, you may be wondering whether I’m qualified to teach you anything about SEO. If you have the same doubt, just google for “free leads generation system” or “leads generation system” and see who is in the top 10. These are just two of the thousands of first page I have on Google.

How to get my website rank top in Google?

This is the most common question, but it is a poor question. Why? Because you are likely to be ranking top in Google already. Just type your entire domain name in Google. Is your website in the first page? Better question please…..

How to get my website rank top for a particular keyword phrase in Google?

Technically, you can get any web page (not just website) into the first page of Google by building lots of backlinks to that web page using that particular keyword phrase as the anchor text.

For example, if you want to rank top for the keyword phrase “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you need to have lots of backlinks to your web page using “buy cheap Christmas presents” as the anchor text.

If so, can I forget about all other things and just focus on link building?

You can, but if you work on ‘other factors’ at the same time, you don’t have to build that many backlinks. And the ‘other factors’ are definitely easier to accomplish than link building.

What are the ‘other factors’?

The ‘other factors’ basically involve making your web page more relevant to the keyword phrase you are optimizing.

By the way, did you notice that I always use the word web page instead of website?

Google views every web page as independent content, meaning technically, if you have a website about dog, you can add a web page about stomach pain and get that web page to rank top for stomach pain, even though your website is about dog!

Don’t agree? Just look at Wikipedia.com and Ezinearticles.com. They have articles in all kinds of categories. But almost all of them are ranking well in Google.

Ok, back to the ‘other factors’. Here are a list of the other factors that are fundamental in boosting your search engine result.

‘Other factors’ #1 – The title tag

In a html source code, a title tag looks something like this:

<title>Title of your web page</title>

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you must include “buy cheap Christmas presents” in the title tag, as near to the starting line as possible.

‘Other factors’ #2 – Keywords in the description meta tag

In a html source code, a description meta tag looks something like this:

<meta name=”Description” content=”Your Description About The Page.”>

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you must include “buy cheap Christmas presents” in the description meta tag, as near to the starting line as possible.

‘Other factors’ #3 – Keywords in the url

The best is to have a website named buycheapChristmaspresents.com. But if you have many keywords to optimize, buying a domain name for each of them can be very costly. If so, you should at least name the web page as yourdomain.com/buy-cheap-Christmas-presents.html

‘Other factors’ #4 – Keywords within the content

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, try to include “buy cheap Christmas presents” at least once in the first paragraph, once in the last paragraph and a few within the content.

Actually there is no strict rule on this but minimally, you should include the exact keyword at least once in the entire content.

’Other factors’ #5 – Website authority

If you have been reading up on SEO, you must have heard of Authority Site. The idea is if your site is an Authority Site, the search engine will send tons of traffic for all kinds of keyword phrases to you, pretty much like what Wikipedia and Ezinearticle have established now.

Website authority is at domain level. Meaning if your domain is an authority site, all other web pages in this domain will benefit.

2 important factors that affect website authority are

1) The age of the site

There is nothing you can do with the age of your site. You just have to be patience, and you need to have a long term vision for your website. Don’t build one site, chuck it away after 3 months and start another one.

2) The amount of backlinks to the homepage and internal pages, especially backlinks from other authority sites.

The difference between SEO backlinks (as discussed earlier) and backlinks for site authority (as mentioned here) is that the former is keyword specific, i.e., you have to include the keywords in the anchor text. For backlinks to boost site authority, any dofollow backlink will count. They can be keyword-specific anchor link or simply a URL link. Of course, all the SEO backlinks that you’ve established will help to boost your site authority.

Fundamentally, that’s all you need to know about SEO. I’m serious! Armed with these basic knowledge, I already gained hundreds of top positions in Google.

In the next SEO tutorial, we will look at some common SEO mistakes webmasters make. Who knows, you can be making those mistakes too.

First thing first, what is an SEO Backlink? How is it different from backlink?

Quoting the definition from Wikipedia, “Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page.”

Technically, a backlink looks like this:

<a href=”http://yourdomain.com”>whatever text or can be the url itself</a>

Backlinks are important, especially in determining the PageRank of your web page. But to rank high in organic search result, especially in Google, the most popular search engine, you need more than just backlink. You need SEO Backlink.

The difference? Read more »

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