There are so many people telling you what to do to get to the top of the search engine rankings. All your hard work at SEO (search engine optimization) will be for nothing though if you don’t avoid these 9 simple mistakes that will hit your rankings hard.

1. Not trying to get links to your pages - your site should not be an island, links allow people to find you. The philosophy of “build it and they will come” could not be more wrong. You live in the real world. You owe it to your site to try and get people linking in to you. It’s what makes the Internet go round. read further on for ideas and help on getting these links.
2. Unoptimized URLs - the most optimal URLs contain relevant, popular keywords with a minimal number of slashes and no question marks. If you use WordPress, be sure to change your “Permalink Options” to use rewritten URLs rather than the default of your post Ids.
3. Using Javascript or Flash navigation menus - a search engine crawler usually can’t follow these menus as it can’t see them, so it's not going to crawl your site if that's all you have. Most menus which use flash can be replicated using CSS, so if you have flash menus you should try to look into this as soon as possible.
4. Not using the meta-tags – They are a little 1990's but they still have their uses. These are like the guidelines for the search engine. They are little used nowadays but they DO provide a guide as to the site and are still used to varying degrees by some search engines, especially the description part when search results are shown. Make sure you don’t leave them empty and so open to fate.
5. Multiple homes for your site - make sure you use either just WWW. or just HTTP: The search engine will rank both if you don’t and you can lose half or more your power. The trend is moving towards omitting the WWW so hop on the bandwagon and save your rank. Just redirect one to the other.
6. Unoptimized anchor text - interlinking within in your site let’s you link to your articles using the anchor text you most want your article to be associated with. Take advantage of this fact and also know that it has the added benefit of keeping users on your site for longer. Using a variety of text and mixing in up can help a lot here.
7. Unoptimized content - if what you write doesn’t tell the search engine what it’s about then it’s useless. You could write a 100,000 word article on global warming for all the search engine cares, but if you don’t mention that word then it is next to useless. You need to show the search engine what is important in terms of that page as well as informing the reader. Write for your readers, but don't ignore what the search engine needs to know.
8. Too much reliance on images and flash - if the content is hidden away in images and flash then the search engine is going to miss it the message and that means you aren’t going to rank for it. It’s as simple as that.
9. Letting pages be indexed that shouldn’t - there are pages on your site that are just duplicates, such as the archives, the post page and the category page. There are also pages which are of no value such as the contact form or the printer friendly page. You can heck out what is showing up in the search engines using the site: operand in Google and then disallow unnecessary pages using your robots.txt file. Duplicate content is heavily penalized so you really need to watch out for this.

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