Internet Marketing consultant David Bain has revealed what he calls the “Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes” commonly made by website designers. The recently published report is aimed at encouraging small businesses to obtain a basic understanding of website coding.

April 27, 2007 — Internet Marketing consultant David Bain has revealed what he calls the “Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes” commonly made by website designers.

The recently published report is aimed at encouraging small businesses to obtain a basic understanding of website coding.

Bain says “Search Engine Optimization has two key pillars - off-site optimisation and on-site optimisation. Off-site optimisation focuses on building up keyword-rich links to your website from other sites.

“On-site optimization, on the other hand, ensures that website coding is as efficient as possible for search engines and maximises click-through rates from search engine results. This report focuses squarely on on-site optimization - and specifically on how existing websites can be improved.”

According to Bain, the top 10 search engine optimization mistakes are:

1) Wrong keyword phrases - specifically, not researching and targeting keyword phrases that are relevant to your audience. You can research keyword phrases for free at freekeywords.wordtracker.com

2) Wrong page title - this is the title that appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser when viewing a web page. This also gets displayed as your page title in search engine results, so it has to contain your keyword phrase as well as a reason to click on the link.

3) Wrong ‘meta’ description - this is the description that appears underneath the page title in search engine results. Again, improving this can drastically improve your ‘click-through rate’ after being found in a search engine.

4) Wrong ‘meta’ keywords - although not as important as it once was, your ‘meta’ keywords give you another opportunity to tell search engines what your page is about. Remember to be specific in relation to your page topic.

5) No heading tags - Heading tags are little pieces of code that surround the most important heading on your web page. These tags simply say to search engines that this is the topic which is covered in the page. Remember to include your keyword phrase.

6) No ‘alt’ or ‘title’ tags - These are the tags that display alternative text if an image can’t be displayed. However, they also give you a further opportunity to communicate your page topic to search engines.

7) Wrong URL format - A URL is simply a web page address. By making your URL’s as simple as possible and by incorporating your keyword phrases within your URL, you improve your search engine optimization.

8) Not enough content - Search engines still struggle to rank websites on anything other than the volume of quality content. Quite simply, if you don’t have enough content on your website, then you aren’t giving search engines enough to ‘chew on’.

9) No content keywords - As well as including your keyword phrase in the areas mentioned above, you need to include this phrase at least once within your main page content to demonstrate that the page subject matter is relevant to the phrase.

10) No keyword rich text navigation - Apart from content on the page, search engines also determine the relevance of a page by reviewing the phrases contained in the links to that page. You need to ensure that you also have your keyword phrases in links to each page.

The full report can be downloaded for free from www.Top10SEOMistakes.com.

David Bain is the founder of Purple Internet Marketing Limited, which was launched in 2007 and now offers Internet marketing seminars, one-to-one Internet marketing training, e-business strategy consulting and Internet marketing training videos.
For more information contact David Bain on 0131 2080808, 07815 120 750 (mobile) or email david [at purpleinternetmarketing.com.

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