Every parent wants to give their child the best possible start in life and, generally, everyone wants their son or daughter to be successful, popular and a good citizen. Assets such as an education, good communication skills, and pleasant manners and presentation are the basic tools with which to equip them to head out into the world.

Surely the same principles can be applied to a website? In fact, many people refer to their businesses as ‘their baby’, so why do so many send their babies out badly dressed, uneducated and unable to function coherently? 

Having sat in on many Internet Marketing Training seminars as part of my job, I have picked up a pretty good sense of what are the most common mistakes people make in terms of Search Engine Optimisation when they are building their websites. Best practice SEO needs to be implemented right from the start and many a teenage tantrum could be avoided if you can get the basics right at the start. Here are just a few common errors …

Flash, Splash and Blowing your Cash
Here’s the truth – Google is an intellectual not a playboy and is always more impressed by text than graphics. Put simply, search engines do not see expensive Flash graphics and if you use fancy images and animations, it is vital that you don’t embed your important text or sales messages within the graphics. If they absolutely must be a part of an image, then repeat them on the page elsewhere. Another common mistake is using a ‘Splash’ page when entering your site. Search engines weight the home page as the most important and if you have a fancy page but with little or no text content, then you are missing a vital opportunity.

Meat But no Stuffing Please…
There’s always some people out there (and I’ve seen a few at some of our Internet Marketing Training seminars!) who have visions of being Samson to Google’s Goliath. Thinking you can win the game of SEO by shorts cuts or cheating is the quickest route to disaster, or in Google’s case, a black-listing. Filling a page and meta tags with meaningless repetitions of keyphrases is a dangerous game to play. There’s a big difference between effective, skilled Keyword Enriching and keyword stuffing and the truth is, you’ll never outsmart Google.

Pop Up, Shut Down
It’s amazing the amount of ‘pop ups’ we still see appearing on websites. All you really need to know is this - search engines don’t see them and people hate them! So why use them?

There are many, many more important elements that need considering and you can read about the basic building blocks of Search Engine Optimisation here.