The Top SEO Mistakes According To Matt Cutts

SEO is such a complex business that SEO professionals always appreciate having Google come out and bring them a little clarity.

In the beginning of April, Matt Cutts, head of the webspam department at Google, came out with a video that detailed the five most damaging SEO mistakes that website owners tended to make.

These are common mistakes. Resolving to never make one of these elementary mistakes can be an easy way to success.

Ignoring site navigation

When website owners are warned about the ill effects of poor site navigation, they usually imagine that the advice giver is talking about bad, amateurish sites.
Have you ever had a phone or some other gadget on which you could never find the feature you wanted because the manufacturer gave it an irrelevant name and hid it 14 layers deep in a menu tree? You can have poor navigation on beautiful, expensive website too, in the same way. This doesn't just hurt usability – it hurts SEO as well. Search crawlers can find it difficult to serve up pages for relevant searches when the navigation on a site is poorly thought out.

Doing the opposite of keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing has always been the traditional low-tech SEO strategy. This method, though, has been discredited for quite a while now. Having a word or phrase appear often on a page doesn't fool Google anymore. Many website owners believe that just because keyword stuffing is out, they don't need to worry about keywords of any kind anymore.
 
While Google doesn't like keyword stuffed pages anymore, it still does need keywords. Creating a business webpage with no attention paid to the relevant keywords simply won't work. The term relevant is the operative one here. This is one area that the Matt Cutts video focuses on.

Many business owners put quite a bit of time into thinking of various phrases that they could aim their webpages at. They don't spend much time vetting those phrases for search popularity, though. It doesn't matter how descriptive a keyword phrase appears. If it isn't often used by people who search for your particular product on Google, it won't do any good to aim pages at them. You need to use resources like Google's Keyword Tool to make sure that your keyword choices are ones that people actually use when they search.

Old-fashioned link building

Website owners often obsess over getting great backlinks to their website. Of course, this is important – except that focusing mainly on backlinking is the wrong way to look at the problem. You need to think about creating interesting and compelling content first. Once you do this, persuading other websites to link to your business is relatively easy. It makes no sense to focus on backlinking when you don't have a great website to begin with.

Not putting effort into creating compelling titles and page descriptions

Showing up on a search results page is important. Once your webpage shows up there, it's up to the searcher whether he decides to click a page or not. To encourage him to do this, your page title and description need to be meaningful, descriptive and catchy. Titles and descriptions are instrumental in helping search engine crawlers, too. Many websites, though, pay no attention to these niceties. Sometimes, pages even show up that are still called Untitled.

Not staying updated

You can't plan for great SEO without knowing what SEO is today. The rules of the game keep changing and evolving. It makes no sense getting into a game like SEO when you don't plan to learn what is expected of your website today.