subject: Costly SEO Mistakes to Watch Out For [print this page] Many website owners don't realize that it's an SEO mistake to have pages with many images and little content. While images can certainly make your site look impressive, they have little value when it comes to search engine optimization.
What the search engines value is original content, so make sure you have enough of this on your site. There's nothing wrong with using images, just don't overdo it. In addition to not helping your SEO, having too many images also makes your site run more slowly, another reason to limit their use. The way to make your images help your SEO efforts is to This is something that the search engines can read, unlike the image itself. The best place to use your keywords, however, is always in your original content. Since the search engines still favor content, this should be your priority.
Another mistake is ignoring the power of internal linking and only focusing on getting outbound links. If you can use internal linking in a manner such as sites like Wikipedia employ, you will be using an effective on site SEO tactic. There are many reasons why search engines favor sites that have good internal linking but the biggest is that when you have a good network of internal links, it shows that your site is resourceful and people will be able to find what they want on it easily by following these links. And achieving this is not a big deal, since all you need to know is what keywords to include in your anchor text and what pages you're linking to.
For this to work, though, you can't just add links wherever you feel like it. You have to create a very understandable internal linking structure, so that there is no confusion for the search engines and as well as human readers.
Another factor that the search engines look at now is the speed of your site, so this is something to be aware of. Visitors don't like slow sites either, of course. One thing that can cause your site to load and run slowly is having lots of code installed, and this won't help you with the search engines.
Having an external CSS file and not an internal CSS file will prevent this from happening. Your page will load more quickly when you do this. Search engines are all about speed and relevancy, so you'll have to agree with them and understand the importance of your site's speed. It's essential that your site is both search engine optimized and useful to visitors, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. In summary, if you manage to not make the kind of mistakes mentioned in this article, your SEO campaigns will run much more smoothly.
