Search Engine Optimization Mistakes

Black Hat SEO is known today as the art of trying to use techniques to trick the search engines, thus, achieving higher search engine rankings.

Redirects – Redirects can make search engines think you are trying to trick them and your visitors. If you must use a redirect, a 301 redirect is the safest one to use.

Image ALT Tags – Many webmasters will forget to use the ALT tag on their images. ALT tags make your site more accessible, plus you can use keywords where appropriate.
Incorrect Title Tag – The Title Tag on your page should describe the contents of the page, you should not stuff the title tag full of all your keywords.

Duplicate Content – If your pages have the exact same content can hurt your rankings. Also be careful of publish public domain articles; many times these are also published on other sites as well which leads you to more duplicate contents.
Reciprocal Link Abuse – If you get an over abundance of links in a short period of time can hurt your rankings. Also keep in mind that unrelated links will not give your site more weight or help your ranks.
Cloaking – This technique involves tricking the search engines into thinking they are getting a different page under other circumstances. Cloaking is a definite no no.

Dynamic Websites (ASP, Cimages Fusion, etc.)
Active Server Pages (ASP) and Cimages Fusion Sites (CFM) are examples of dynamically generated websites so they do not have the same impact on the search engines as static HTML pages. There must be a static html homepage and several static inside pages for your website to rank successfully.
We strongly recommend reprogramming these pages as HTML. This can be done while being hosted on a Windows NT server. If this is not an option, take the homepage, reprogram it to a stationary index.html page and add hidden HTML pages.

Websites with no inside pages
A website with no inside pages may never be indexed by a search engine spider. Search engines want their database full of valuable content to drive searchers to. If they only find a homepage there is a very good chance that your website will not have enough content to be considered valuable. Search engines look for websites with a main theme on the homepage that develops into relating themes on the inside pages.

Redirect or Pointers
Redirected domains or pointers to your website are a problem with some of the search engines. Although technically there is no duplicate content, their crawlers will interpret it as duplicate content. Place a stationary index page with a no index, no follow tag. If this stationary index page is a copy of your homepage that is even better. Just to be safe remove the meta tags leaving only the no index, no follow tag. Furthermore, if your homepage has an automatic redirect placing your visitor into your inside pages, it will hinder search engine exposure. Our advice with redirects is just get rid of them by using the method above.

Anytime you move a page, or change the URL that is used to access a specific page or set of pages, you need to setup a 301 Redirect.

301 redirects are the proper way to move a web page. However, many website owners are horrified when they put a 301 in place only to find that their images page drops from the rankings without their new page being included. This is normal and is an inconvenience, but it is a part of the process. Anytime you make significant changes to your website you should expect fluctuation in your rankings, and setting up a 301 redirect is no exception. With time your new page will be included in the index.