subject: Three Major SEO Mistakes You Don't Want to Make [print this page] The rules search engines set for their ranking requirements are always being changing and the means of optimizing websites are changing as well. If you want to crush your competition on get on Google's first page, then you need to avoid the following blunders. Working on these will help you get better results from your efforts, regardless of your budget. Most new webmasters commit the SEO mistake of making the site too flash-heavy. While a flash on a website may look neat, it doesn't help you any with SEO. While flash looks neat for those humans reading your site, it's invisible to search engines so your site isn't likely to get crawled. If you want to get seen by the search engine spiders, you must have content on your site as that's what they look for. It's the only way to achieve a higher place in the searches. You can still have your flash as long as you use text also so that the search engines can find your site. You have to have a lot of text if you want to rank high. You should never just take content from other sites, as that's not right. You can't just copy content and hope that it's going to help you, because it won't. While you may get away with it at first, eventually people will understand that you're plagiarizing. The largest downfall is that the search engines have figured out how to get around this, and they can recognize content that's been duplicated. Your site will stick in the filter that's reserved for double content and that will not rank you very high. This is the main reason why it's crucial for search engines as well as visitors to like the content that you use. Just remember that ethics is something you always want to use with SEO. You will find that companies offering SEO services are all over the place these days. You'll only want to use the companies that use whitehat SEO methods, and stay away from the companies that don't. The thing is that you won't even know until your site is banished from the searches. That is why it's necessary only to hire SEO professionals that not only have a reputation, but who will also constantly let you know where their progress lies. If they hide anything from you, they're not the right ones to work with. So, you should never be unethical with your SEO. Don't be one of those webmasters who isn't aware of the damage done to your site by using unethical methods. Keyword stuffing is highly looked down upon and will label your site as a spammer. Similarly, having copied content will tarnish your reputation and get you in the bad books of the search engines. Therefore, no matter if you're going to hire an SEO professional or you're going to do it yourself, you need to use the best SEO techniques.
