3 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

 Optimizing your website to gain search engine positioning
 can be a process that takes a lot of time and focus.
  It’s no wonder a lot of entrepreneurs hire SEO firms to
  handle this for them. But that can be very expensive,
  and it’s hard to know which firms are the best.
  While many stick to “white hat” practices,
   others resort to actions that can get
   your site penalized if found out.

 There are a lot of SEO tactics you can employ
  yourself though, and there are some
  mistakes a lot of site owners make
  that are hurting their search engine rankings.
  Correcting just a few things can actually
 make a significant difference. Below are three of the most common mistakes made by online entrepreneurs. Correcting these won’t guarantee you a first place Google position, but it will get you on the right track.

1. Ineffective Page Titles – If the name of your company is all that comes up at the top of your site’s pages (in the title bar), it will only help improve searches for your company name. And those searches aren’t made by people you need to attract. They already know who you are. To attract people searching for what you do rather than who you are, customize the <title> tag for each page to reflect what that page is about, being sure to use key search terms whenever possible. This will increase the chances of your site coming up as a search result for those keywords.

2. Placing Text in an Image – If you’re not an html or php pro, it can be difficult to get your site to line up exactly as you want it. All those <div> and <style> tags can be a real pain. So putting text in an image is a great idea, right? It’s lined up exactly where you want it, and you can even use funky fonts! But hold on. Search engines don’t know a picture of a squirrel from an image of your bio. To them, it’s just an image. So any keywords or phrases that are in the text within the image are not considered at all for SEO purposes. Sure, you can add <alt> and <title> tags to your images, and that will help to a degree, but it isn’t actual content, and content is what the search engines love most.

If you’re trying to optimize your site for search engine ranking, be more concerned with the context of your text than the design. That’s not to say design isn’t important. It is very important from the standpoint of providing the right experience for your site visitors. But you can have both – a great looking site that has a first page search engine position.

3. Not Using Analytics – Google analytics (or comparable statistics tools) can make a big difference for you in a lot of ways. Using Google analytics isn’t going to help your SEO directly, but it will tell you if what you’re doing is paying off, and that’s worth a ton. Many site owners are just concerned with how many hits their site is getting. This is an important statistic, but only in conjunction with other numbers.

For example, if your site gets 2,000 hits a day, but 90% bounce (leave practically immediately after arriving), it’s not doing you much good. Studying your bounce rates, traffic sources, click-throughs, and other pertinent information will tell you if what you’re doing is working. And if you’re tackling your site’s SEO on your own, you need that knowledge. A big part of making SEO work is tweaking it as you go to constantly improve, and analyzing your stats will help you identify holes and make adjustments as necessary.

Again, SEO isn’t as easy as a lot of people think, but just about everyone can improve their site’s search engine status to some degree, simply by avoiding the above mistakes. What other SEO blunders do you see site owners making? Share with the community in the comments below.