Finding ways to entice traffic to your site regularly is a primary element for the success of any online business. Perhaps the best way to find this kind of traffic is to learn ways to optimize your website so it appeals to search engines. Unfortunately, Internet marketers these days are focusing more on tricking the search engines, than helping them. When this happens, Google and other major search engines tend to ban websites using less ethical tactics. Then there are those webmasters who aren’t aware that the tactics they’re using are considered to be unethical.

In both the scenarios, it’s the lack of knowledge that pushes them to take bad steps. A big part of getting SEO right is also knowing what you’re doing wrong. Let’s look at some of the more major SEO mistakes you should try to avoid.

Using Broad Keywords

When attempting SEO, most webmasters starting out make the first mistake, which is to insert too many broad keywords into their writing. It is a true statement that SEO requires keywords, but too many keywords can get you penalized by the search engines because they’ll think you’re just spamming with your site. This will drop your site with the search engine rankings, and there goes all your traffic, too. Your traffic will become displeased as they’re more interested in information they can read and that offers something they can use. Your website’s speed matters, not only to your visitors but also to the search engines.

Too Much Code

If you have a lot of convoluted code on your site’s pages, it can make your site load more slowly, which could count against you with Google. This is why you should aim to have an external CSS file, not an internal one. When you have an external CSS file, it helps your page to remain light and keeps the loading process smooth. Search engines want to offer their users the best possible results, in terms of content, information and relevance, so your aim is to appeal to those search engines. While it’s important to appease the search engine’s criteria, your site should also appeal to your visitors as well.

Poor Content

Another SEO error that many webmasters make is writing an irrelevant site title and a poor site description, which can both be detrimental to your search engine rankings. Search engines use the title and description to try and figure out which theme is predominant within your text content and then rank you accordingly. Compared to a few years ago, search engines and their algorithms for determining rankings have evolved, so pay attention to these elements.

Just stay away from too much flashiness on your page and use ALT tags on your images whenever you can. If you use the mistakes you just learned about, you’ll score higher in the ranks and you will never see yourself banished.