Top 10 SEO Mistakes

So, you’ve got yourself a great-looking website for your real estate business and now want to get some traffic. Everyone’s talking about SEO, so that must be what you need to do, right? Not so fast…

Before you read any of the following, get used to the idea that you’ll be writing content. Content, content, content. SEO is great, but without good content, you’re sunk.

So, while you’re writing said great-and-focused content, here are the top 10 most common SEO mistakes to watch out for:

1. Keyword Dilution
If you choose too many keywords to optimize for, especially words that are unrelated, this will reduce the effectiveness of all of them. It is best to select a set of keywords (5-10) that best matches your business, and focus your website’s content on topics related to them.

2. Keyword Spamming
Don’t overuse your keywords. Search engines are smart enough to recognize when your content uses words too frequently. Punishments range from reduced ranking to banning from search results. The key is to keep your content focused and on-topic, and valuable to readers rather than a stream of repeated related words.

3. Link Spamming
If you have too many links to/from the same sites, even if it is not an intentional cross-linking scheme, search engines may penalize you for link-spamming. The best way to avoid this is to create compelling content that people will naturally link to. To get the word out, search for “real estate blogs” or “real estate forums” on Google. Post some comments and link back to your site. If your content is compelling, you’ll start seeing organic growth immediately.

4. Linking to Bad Sites
Outbound links to bad sites is extremely harmful to your ranking. If you make sure you link to sites with content relevant to your topic, you can mitigate this. Links to illegal download sites, or other sites deemed questionable by search engines, can drown you.

5. Circular Linking
Site A links to site B. Site B links to site C. Site C links back to site A. This is circular linking and, even when disguised, is penalized by search engines. Good quality content on your site will attract the right types of links over time, so don’t try to fool the search engines by cutting corners – it won’t work.

5. Duplicate Content
Search engines will penalize you for duplicating content on different pages throughout your site. Again, the “Content is King” rule applies here – there is nothing better than on-topic, updated and useful content.

6. Invisible Text
Ever wonder why you don’t see this bad habit much anymore? It’s because search engines penalize it tremendously. Keyword-spamming white-background sites with white text was all the rage back in the early 2000s until search engines started levying heavy penalties.

7. Poor Page Coding
Some sites look great, but they are coded terribly badly. As a human, this is hard to see, but from a search engine’s point of view, pooly coded sites are very hard to read. If you don’t code your site yourself, make sure your designer has a good reputation for SEO and site design before you drop big bucks into a good looking flop.

8. A Flash Intro/Homepage
Search engines can’t read flash pages, so stay away from these monstrosities at all cost. In general, flash movies/images won’t further your SEO cause at all unless they have good alternative text descriptions in the page’s code.

10. Movies without Transcriptions
Are a waste of time. Unless you’ve included all the text from the movie in the page, these will contribute to your site’s search engine ranking at all.

The message is pretty clear: content, content, content. If your site is flush with good quality content centering on some well-chosen keywords, you’re in good shape.