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Avoiding Top SEO Mistakes
By Robin Dale (c) 2009 

Following are the 9 Biggest SEO Mistakes which Web Designers &
Web Developers should avoid.

Splash Page

I've seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big
banner image and a link "Click here to enter" on their homepage.
The worst case - the "enter" link is embedded in the Flash
object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the
link.

This is fine if you don't care about what a search engine knows
about your site; otherwise, you're making a BIG mistake. Your
homepage is probably your website's highest ranking page and
gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will
not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking
structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and
links to important pages.

Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as
those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you,
but they can't be seen by the search engines; and thus the links
in the Flash menu will not be followed.

Image and Flash Content

Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can't read the
text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make
this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target
keywords) in Flash and image.

Overuse of Ajax

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitors by
implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation
purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake?
Because, ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not
spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax - since the address URL doesn't
reload, your visitor cannot send the current page to their
friends.

Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme
design into sub level folders (i.e. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and
redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root
location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

"Click Here" Link Anchor Text

You probably see this a lot where people use "Click here" or
"Learn more" as the linking text. This is great if you want to
be ranked high for "Click Here". But, if you want to tell the
search engine that your page is important for a topic, then use,
that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It's much more
descriptive (and relevant) to say "learn more about {keyword
topic}"

Warning: Don't use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your
website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

Common Title Tag Mistakes

Same or Similar Title Text:

Every page on your site should have a unique