Search engine optimisation can be one of the hardest and most rewarding tools in your online business arsenal. It helps with marketing, advertising and selling your products or services. There is so much involved, it is rather easy to go wrong. Here are just five of them:

Make Sure You Don’t Under Utilise Your Site – You need to pay attention to every aspect of your website development. Most people think that the only important part is the content. Optimising content is only one piece of the pie. When you concentrate on content and not on leveraging all areas of your site, you are robbing your own pockets.

You will get visitors if your content is on-point, but the search engines can rank you even higher if you used keywords in other places too. Remember that the page has a headline, an article can have a title and a picture has an associated caption. Now use all of these to help you.

Keyword Overload - Search engine bots are smarter than most people give them credit for. Using keywords too much will cause them to just skip over your content and thus give you a lower ranking for those keywords. Some people seem to think that they can just use as many as they like and they would be more visible, but this is not the case.

Search engines consider people who stuff keywords to be cheating. You should always stay within an allowable density. And, those keywords will show up naturally throughout the article so it doesn’t sound like it was thrown together just for the keywords.

Keyword Density - You can have too few keywords as well as too many. Some people actually forget about the key words when writing. You might have written the most informative article about a subject, but without giving the search engines the appropriate clues, they will be unable to rank you and no one will find your work. It’s not sufficient to use the word once or twice in an article.

No Variety - For better optimisation, a website shouldn’t use just one keyword. For example, if your primary keyword is “chocolate,” then your whole website won’t be based on that one word. People use a variety of similar words alone or in combination to find what they are looking for with search engines. If you make and sell chocolates, there are better words to use: chocolate treat, chocolates, how to make chocolate, etc. it’s like throwing all your eggs in one basket if you don’t diversify your keywords.

Use Reciprocal Links – Back links are important, but they are not all created equal. And search engines like organic links better than simply offering reciprocal link sharing. You want others to link to you because they like your product and what your website presents to others. Using quality content on your site, in article directories and on social bookmarking sites can increase your quality inbound links for higher ranking.

Start out on solid footing with professional seo services. Don’t get involved with first-timer mistakes!

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Experienced Executive Virtual Assistant who collaborates with businesses and individuals with the sole aim of accomplishing their professional goals. Want to learn more about these comprehensive online business building success strategies? Contact VMF Today!