There are many mistakes made when people optimise their websites. Many of these come from using outdated methods. Read the 10 points below to see what to avoid and what to improve in your SEO efforts.

1)      Make your browser title tags keyword driven. Do not include the company name unless it is the keywords you are targeting that page for. Also do not over use any one particular keyword once in a title tag. Also keep them to the point. Do not add more than three keyphrases within any one title tag. A good keyphrase for a credit card comparison website might be:

Compare Credit Cards | Best Credit Card Offers

2)      Getting thousands or even hundreds of links will not always help your site. Make your site a useful resource that people want to link to is much better. What you need is related sites to link to your site.

3)      Put little or no duplicate content on your website. Do not copy content from other websites and paste it onto your site. The search engines can pick up on this and do not like it. Write your own original content.

4)      Make content good quality. If you read it and think no one would be interested in this then it is no good. Do not just use content to stuff loads of keywords into. Search engines do not like this.

5)      Include meta descriptions in all your main pages. Do not make them to long though. About thirty words or so is ample. Make the description an honest and intriguing description of the page. This is what will appear in the search engine results pages and is what people will read to decide to click to your page or not. Do not keyword stuff.

6)      Do not use frames or flash in your site. Site that use either of these methods tend not to rank so well in search engines.

7)      Add useful and original content to your site on a frequent basis. Search engines like sites that have a constant flow of useful good quality original content that is related to the subject of the site.

8)      Make sure if you use image buttons for your navigation, you also include text links at the bottom of the pages to the main pages. Make the anchor text, that is the text that is the link, the text that describes the page. In other words if you have a page that is about search engine optimisation, make the link Search Engine Optimisation.

9)      Do not put invisible text or links on your site. This is not liked at all by the search engines. Also make sure all text is readable. In other words do not make it to small to read either. Text which is 9pt is probably too small.

10)  Keep up to date with the latest search engine optimisation techniques. Read sites like SearchEngineWatch.com and SearchEngineNews.com and put into Google search engine news to find many other useful websites. Another useful resource is my blog at Top Click Media Blog. The trick is to keep learning. You never know it all.