1. Make sure your navigation is search-engine friendly. The simpler the navigation the better – if your users are confused, web crawlers will be as well. Sometimes making something simpler is harder work. Take the time to organize the website into only a few main pages, and then from there you can have as many subcategories as are needed. Link placement should make sense – do not try to shove links for every single corner of your site onto every single page. Go from broad to the more specific categories.
2. Some popular design features can be SEO disasters. JavaScript is confusing to search engines so try to avoid it, at least make sure those elements are worth any potential lost SEO opportunity. Do not replace word links with picture links. Web crawlers can’t read a picture. You can have a picture next to the embedded link of course, or make both a link.
3. Flash is bad. It’s super cool, yes, but search engines ignore it and users don’t like it that much either. Flash slows down connections and causes all kinds of problems for the end users. If search engines ignore Flash, many end-users despise it. Seriously weigh the benefits of Flash.
4. Optimize images. Make the file size as small as possible and title the image files “image” and then the relevant SEO keyword or phrase. Do not give images unrelated tags however, the tags must relate to the image. Google is onto that trick.
5. Clean code is placed higher in Google searches. For those who do their own coding, who are not using some type of program or template, the simpler the code the better. It also makes it easier to make changes later of course.
6. Make sure you have a site map. Google loves site maps.

There are a lot of myths, some were never true, some used to be true until Google and other search engines changed the rules. Here are some common myths many marketers still believe:

1. Keywords in your domain name are important – It’s not important. Google doesn’t look at the domain name in determining rank anymore. They used to, but not anymore.
2. Social media doesn’t help rank – Sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google + have a huge influence on where you are ranked both through backlinks and through what people are saying about you.
3. You should submit your site to Google and other search engines – The crawlers do this automatically now, usually in a matter of a couple days. There is no advantage to submitting a site unless something about your site causes it to not be indexed, which is a problem with the site, not a submission issue.
4. H1 is the most important thing ever – Google doesn’t rank headings that way. H1, H2, etc, it’s all the same to Google.
5. Linking to high ranking sites is helpful – It’s not at all helpful. If it were, any site could rank high just by adding a bunch of links to Facebook, Craig’s List, Wikipedia, and YouTube. What matters is whether these sites link to you.
6. Usability only matters for human users – While that is the main reason your site needs to be very easy to navigate, if humans have trouble so will web crawlers, and this can hurt your ranking.
7. Internal links don’t matter – Internal linking falls under usability. If you are mentioning an area of your site, linking from within that text makes navigation easier for crawlers (as well as people). By the same token, sporadic or irrelevant internal links for the sake of linking may do more harm than good.

SEO is the wild west of marketing. The only rules are those set by search engines and they only tell you some of the rules some of the time and change them all of the time. There is no SEO Bachelor’s or Master’s or Doctorate Degree yet, and how could there be? By the time they wrote the book it would be obsolete.

Maybe that’s why every day a million sites at least make one of these common mistakes even though professionals in the field have been warning against them for nearly a decade. Here are some of the common mistakes that seem like good ideas, but can be disastrous in the long term.

1. Irrelevancy – So the obvious rule that most people know is not to have ‘cute puppies” as part of your SEO strategy if you do not sell cute puppies—no matter how popular cute puppies may be. A couple things happen; you tick off the people you tricked into visiting, and even if they want your stuff in the future they aren’t going to buy it from you now, and Google will penalize your site once they catch on. This goes for your online ads as well, though Google does not penalize for irrelevant ads, you customers will.

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We’ve talked a bit about backlinks. These are links from another website which lead to one of your websites. Originally the purpose of these was to get more customers to your page via clicks, today most use them for SEO with little concern for their original purpose. Google is trying to get things back the way they were, to an extent at least. So here are some tips for backlinks:

1. Relevancy is the most important thing when it comes to links. It trumps all of these other tips. If it is not relevant stop there.
2. Quality is better than quantity. Some may believe that there is still some value in programs which manufacture thousands of backlinks, but with recent changes many experts are beginning to see these programs as a waste of time.

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Now it needs to be said here that no one really knows everything that goes into how Google indexes different websites. That’s what the Internet is basically, a giant index that returns results prioritized according to the way it is indexed. It’s believed that not even a single person at Google knows everything about their algorithm because different aspects of it are compartmentalized and by design not shared. It may even be the case that some of it is automated so literally no human really knows for sure, but that last part is conjecture. What we do know is that if no single person at Google knows for sure, certainly any marketer or SEO expert who claims to know is probably lying.

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