Common SEO mistakes made by new webmasters.

I often troll through adult webmaster forums such as GFY and (insert one of a million others), to look at the Newbie Forums. It gives me a  pretty good look at new ideas, and you are almost always sure to find some decent discussion, usually from a post where someone asked advice and got some solid answers from somebody with a clue. Of course you have to judge what is a good answer, and what is not, as you often have people without a clue, answering also. But any rate, it kind of lead me into today’s post.

While surfing and reading the Newbie Forums its evident to see that many new webmasters have many great things going for them, they are eager, asking questions, testing theory and actually building things, as opposed to sitting back and running them. But the one thing that stands out to me is that almost all of them make tragic mistakes on their starting sites, which basically seals the deal as far as google giving them any love in the future.

Here is a quick list of the “simple” things I see done wrong everyday.

• Non Unique Content. This is the main offender, most new webmasters get eager to build pages, post to their blogs, or even end up going with plain rss fed garbage regurgitated from sponsor programs account admins. It is ESSENTIAL that you build your site with a unique text base, there has to be a reason for google to include you. Google wants to catalogue and index the world’s information, and then make it searchable by the general public. Now here’s the thing, yes they want every bit of information they can get, BUT they only need a piece once. Anything more then that is just more of the same, and they work to trim and clean the index, NOT add duplicate information to cloud things more.
• Jack of All Trades, Master or None. Its hard to say the above is the main offender, because this is possibly more common, at least as common. A very common mistake is to build your first site and think its best to give your surfers everything, all niches, free pictures and free movies and links out to every possible type of paysite out there. Thousands of galleries onsite, hundreds of links, and basically its all just a huge pile of shit. Focus on ONE theme, ONE niche and hit it hard. Be a Master, not a Jack. “Jacks” don’t make front page for big terms, that is reserved for Masters and Specialists who cater specifically to the search term niche.
• Make Use Of Your Title Tags. Its the simplest, yet most important thing you can do to easily increase your search engine traffic and onpage SEO, is to adjust and correctly write your page titles. Pick any term that you would like to rank for, and do a search right now. I think you will notice that about 90-95% of all sites listed on the first page will have that search term in its title. It matters greatly to Google, and it also weighs in heavily on the clickability of your link in the serps, its the link the surfer will click from Google serps to you.
• Bad Neighborhoods and Link Trades. Linking into a bad site or neighborhood is basically as effective to a webmaster, as shooting themselves in the foot is to a long distance runner. It completely voids any work you have done, and shows to the search engine that you are either shady, dangerous, or totally a fool, none of which you want them to think. Never trade with sites that openly spam Webmaster boards looking for trades, stay away from onpage “link add” services. Don’t use scripts like linkex, and do not trade links with them. Yes it matters, watch what you trade links with, Google is certainly paying attention.