1) Failure to use the ?Title? tag correctly.

If all there is against the ?title? tag is your company name and a welcome mat, the bad news is you got it wrong.

It might not be common knowledge but most search engines index the content of a title tag and consider it one of the most important parts of their algorithm. The words placed in your title can make or break your ranking for search terms on the engines. Instead of just your business name insert your most important search phrases, if you don?t then you are missing an opportunity to get higher search rankings.

Try to keep the title tag within a maximum of 200 characters, which is the average limit most search engines will index, and if you really must include your company name, put it at the very end of the tag.

2) Target Your Keywords and Phrases

A common mistake made by SEO beginners is in the choice of keywords used in the META keyword tag. Sure it might seem logical to target the words clocks and watches if you run a clock and watch repair business, but even if you chanced to rank well for such a competitive term (you won't), how many visitors to your site would leave as soon as they saw you only repaired the things? The answer is most of them. And by using such a generic term you will have missed out on attracting the people actively looking for a clock or watch repairer. Targeting such general keywords is a waste of time. Look instead to optimise your site by using search terms and phrases that are highly targeted to your exact market. When you?ve chosen them, try them out on either the Google keyword tracker, or that offered by Overture to see what additional terms are being searched for.

Seller 1. Keyword phrase. Ladies underwear.
Seller 2. Keyword phrase. Sexy black-lace underwear.

Did your mind get busy there?

3) Does Your Body Let You Down?

If it?s made up almost entirely of graphics, Flash files and huge logos, you might as well call in the undertaker now! Search engines index text, not images. Keep graphics etc to a minimum and never forget to add alternate text when placing an image, to provide something for the crawlers to read. If a site has little or no text on the home page, it has small chance of ranking well in the search engines and is proof of poor optimisation. If you want a web site to rank well, you need to give the engines what they want to see - visible text content that is optimized just as well as the invisible content. That means adding keyword-filled body text to every page you want to reach a high-ranking in the engines.

Three common errors in SEO. How does your own site measure up?

Good thread and great post!

I'd like to add a couple of things, and will probably be back to add more...need to get to work.

One of the first things I look for on a site that complains about lack of SE visitors is the robots.txt - most do not have one.

The robots meta tag is usually left off, too.

Frequently, these sites have left the DocType declaration off, too.

All three of these elements feed the 'bots/spiders. It lets them know if they're welcome, unwelcome, gives instruction about where and when to go or not.

Instead of getting into detailed explanations, I'll leave it those who're interested to find reference materials through their favorite search engine.

I don't struggle too much with meta tags. I usually take keywords (using 10 - 20) and description (about 150 characters, avoiding periods, dashes, etc) and the title (<200 characters as Kate points out) directly from the first paragraph of the page. Reusing those words in graphic ALT (internet explorer) and TITLE (firefox) syntax gives 'bots/spiders lots to snack on.

I'm a fair hand at SEO, but still have a lot to learn! I look forward to reading your info and techniques!

Gotta' go! Have a good one

The robots meta tag and robots.txt can be put to good effect if you have some pages with content that is unrelated to the general purpose of the site e.g. on this forum, I could place a robots metatag in the chat cat to prevent it being crawled so the search engines would only be able to see the more technical threads. This could be very handy if the chat threads became more abundant than the technical ones therefore reducing this site's relevancy to a search engine on the subject of ecommerce.

By default they will follow all links, but carefully choosing which pages to exclude from a SE's index can increase your chances of being found by the keywords of your choice. Apart from unrelated text you might want to consider disallowing system pages from being indexed for example account registration pages which in general have little content of value for a search engine.

Both the robots meta tags and robots.txt are about exclusion rather than inclusion but as my example above shows, excluding certain pages from being indexed can be beneficial.

There's a few nifty things you can do with robots.txt, this handy line can be added to it if you suffer problems with image theft.

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

It won't stop image theft, but it will prevent your images from being displayed on a Google image search.

__________________
Lawrence