Google is a household name in many countries, and when you need some information people will be quick to tell you to, "Google it." If you have a website and you don't see it in Google, then you need to do something about it. The internet started small but it now contains more information than anyone can imagine consuming and because of this it has become a necessity for it to be organized as best as possible. This task has been accomplished by search engines; the largest of which are Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Optimizing your site will not only increase the amount of visits you receive but it will also give you the skills to do the same with any other sites you decide to launch. There are many advantages of search engine optimization or SEO, but the biggest one is you keep getting consistent traffic for free. Sadly, the vast majority of people screw SEO up, along with their site's ranking. This article will be discussing some of the common mistakes that occur when you're trying to optimize your site.

You will want to stay away from the first SEO mistake and that's to stay away from too much flash. While a flash on a website may look neat, it doesn't help you any with SEO. Many website owners try to make their site more impressive and appealing by adding a flash page, which obviously cannot be read by the search engines and therefore cannot be crawled.

The search engine bots only care about the text on your site and if it's not found, they'll go to another site. You will get ranked higher if you do this. If you still want flash, you can use graphics along with your text so that the search engine spiders will see it. Remember, the more text you have, the better it is. Don't make the mistake of stealing the content from other websites, it's not ethical. You can't just copy content and hope that it's going to help you, because it won't. While you may get away with it at first, eventually people will understand that you're plagiarizing. The major reason it's not good to do this is because search engines are extremely smart nowadays and they can tell when you've used content that's been duplicated. There are filters in place for this sort of thing, and that's the last place you want your website to end up if you hope to rank high. That's why it's necessary to insert content that's one of a kind that readers and the search engines will both enjoy.

Getting incoming links too quickly is also a mistake, as it will send out a red flag to the search engine and they'll penalize you for link spamming. A major myth going around right now is that your new site will catapult to the number spot on the first page if your link is mass distributed across the web. Don't be fooled, the search engines know better than to fall for such a silly trick. Are you willing to get your brand new site sandboxed and de-indexed because you didn't have the patience to build your links naturally over time? So if you don't want your site to disappear from the search engines, build links naturally but consistently. All in all, when it comes to SEO, you should always be ethical. The webmasters use such techniques really don't know how they're damaging their sites by using such methods. Don't just stuff keywords in your site or it will be viewed as spam. Also, copying content will put your out of favor with readers as well as search engines. Whether you're a do-it-yourselfer or you wish to hire an SEO professional, just know that it's always about using the good SEO techniques.