SEO Basics: Avoid These Search Engine Optimization Pitfalls – Part 1

When it comes to search engine optimization, there are some fairly basic things to look out for to make sure you’re not shooting yourself in the foot (or in this case, your website).

SEO Pitfalls

1. Flash Websites
   While you can do some amazing things with Flash from an aesthetic and usability standpoint, from an SEO standpoint, you might as well be invisible with a Flash website. Sure, you can do off page things like link building and leverage social media until you’re blue in the face, but the bottom line is that Flash websites do not perform as well, from a search engine optimization standpoint, as their static counterparts, because search engine spiders cannot pick the page content, links etc. out from all that code as well as they can with traditional websites. In SEO terms, Flash websites are the devil.
2. Broken Links
   Broken links are an SEO no-no because they basically tell the search engines that your content is untended and out of date. External broken links (links to other websites from your website) are a minor transgression, but internal broken links (links within your website from one page to another) are viewed more severely. With as easy as it is to detect broken links with software like Xenu’s Link Sleuth and Google’s Webmaster Tools, there’s not much excuse for having broken links on your website.
3. Duplicate Content
   We’ve been taught not to plagiarize since grade school. Well, just because we’re not in school anymore doesn’t make it alright to duplicate content. This is penalized harshly by the search engines, and for good reason. The search engines reward original content and penalize for duplicate content. But be careful that you’re not duplicating yourself either. Putting the same content on multiple pages across your site may cause canonicalization problems or be considered spammy. Even having head tags that are identical (or too similar) may be treated similarly to duplicate content, so be sure to take the time to optimize all of your head tags and don’t use one set across your entire website.