There are many website owners that try to optimize their own websites to help increase traffic. They realize the importance of SEO and rather than look to the professionals opt for the do-it-yourself method. This can work, however, many of these site owners, as well as some professionals in the SEO arena, make mistakes. Here are the top SEO mistakes that I have seen.

1. Lack of Content: No matter what else you do to your website, if you don’t have quality and unique content, you most likely will not rank well. Before any SEO efforts are put forth on your site, make sure that you are providing useful information and not just pages of links and advertisements. Just as in the real estate market where location, location, location is the mantra, in SEO, it is content, content, content.
2. Inaccurate and No Keyword Research: Many web owners jump right in and start optimizing their pages without having any idea as to what their potential clients are looking for. Many sites target phrases that get very little traffic or no traffic at all.
3. Title Tag: Besides good content, the Title Tag is the most important section of your website in the eyes of the search engines and weighs heavily in their algorithms. Many owners miss this opportunity and only include either the page name, such as ‘products’ or their company name in the Title Tag.
4. The Keyword Meta Tag: Many novice website owners believe that as long as they put all of their keywords into the Keyword Meta Tag they will rank well. Many of the engines no longer even look at this tag no matter how many phrases are stuffed into it.
5. Non-Spiderable Navigation: Although they look pretty, JavaScript menus and JavaScript drop down menus do not typically get crawled by the search engine spiders. This means that if you don’t have any other links on your site pointing to those pages, the search engines won’t find them. If the search engines can’t find them they obviously can’t rank well.
6. Image Navigation: Although the search engines can spider images of text that are hyperlinked, they can not read the text. The stie will not be benefit from having keywords within their text links which is an area with weight in the engine’s algorithms.
7. Flash Only Website: Search engines can not read information within flash. If your site is strictly Flash, regardless of the quality content, you won’t rank well. If you insist on having a strictly flash site, make sure that you have an html equivalent alternative.
8. Backlink Spam: The novice SEO will read that links pointing back to their sites are important so immediately start submitting their site everywhere including many sites that may be banned or black listed at Google. A link building strategy should be carefully put together.