SEO still seems like a very foggy effort to many website owners. I still see people in the forums and blogs that seem to be stuck in search engine optimization circa 2001 by looking for directory submission services and articles “blasts” which do nothing but flood the web pages with junk. There is such a thing as good search engine marketing and it is important to fully understand this.
Let’s take a look at some of the largest SEO mistakes a website can make that will ultimately hurt their SEO efforts:

SEO Sin#1 – Mass Submission:
A mass submission of almost anything online is just not as effective as it once was. There is no easy way of marketing your business online. There is a tremendous amount of activity in the search engines now than there ever has been and it takes a strategic approach to push your way through all the noise in the online space. Internet marketing is all about being strategic and placing things where they will deliver the most bang for your buck. Whether that buck is monetary or simply your time, it is important that your online effort also delivers some targeted traffic to your website.

SEO Sin#2 – Over Stuffing:
Your SEO is not Thanksgiving so don’t over stuff yourself. If you are launching a business profile don’t jam 16 keywords into the title. If the keyword is part of your business name that is fine but to leave a sentence of keywords in your company name, description or anywhere else for that matter is a horrible approach. Sometimes you can achieve this task tastefully but often times greed sets in for most. Same rule or principal applies to almost anything you do online. Whether it is a meta tag, h1 tag or even your Facebook fan page you have to keep it clean and tasteful. People can often notice when someone is over optimizing.

SEO Sin#3 – Duplicate Meta Info:
Sometimes I come across websites that have the same meta information going across the entire website. Your meta tag information is descriptive information relating directly to the topic of that page and should never be the same across the board. From an SEO standpoint this is horrible because it does not give your pages the ability to individually rank in search results.

SEO Sin#4 – Stale Content:
The content on your website is going to be a very important driving force on how people respond on your website. If your content seems stale and just not with it your web traffic is not going to respond very well and neither are your search rankings. Take the time to update your website and copy and make it search engine friendly by utilizing some SEO related keywords naturally throughout your text.

SEO Sin#5 – Duplicate Content:
Not only does duplicate content leave behind a very poor user experience but the ramifications from the search engines could be crippling. Duplicate content, if not managed properly could results in search penalties leaving search rankings in a state of disarray. Your website content should always be unique and compelling. Often times this will happen if you have different versions of your home page on three separate files and do not even know it, such as: www.site.com or www.site.com/index.html.

SEO Sin#6 – Too Much CSS:
CSS is the new html. CSS allows websites to really do some neat things without having to worry about flash or any other non-popular forms of coding. CSS works in sheets that overlap each other and too much CSS can either slow down your page load time or sometimes trick the search engines into thinking there is hidden content.

SEO Sin#7 – Sloppy Interlinking:
Interlinking should be done properly and strategically. Not everything requires interlinking and too much interlinking will cause your audience to tune out.

SEO Sin#8 – URL Structures:
Do your URL structures have a strong of characters at the end of the URL that look horrendous and sloppy? If they do they will react the same way they look in the search results. Clean and tighten them up and you will strengthen your SEO efforts a great deal.

SEO Sin#9 – Flash:
If you still think flash is nice and fancy you are going to have some problems in the search engines. Flash is outdated and tacky and if you plan on building your website in flash it will almost never rank in the search results.

SEO Sin#10 – Lack of Knowledge:
Take the time and study up on the industry before you deem your onsite SEO changes a failure. They are the foundation to everything you will do online so make sure you educate yourself if you plan on doing these efforts online yourself.

It is important to know that onsite SEO is the foundational step to building up your web presence, so don’t commit any SEO sins!