The greatest concern for most webmasters is avoiding search engine optimization mistakes and driving traffic to their websites. Novice webmasters may rush to get their website up and running, only to wonder later what else they should have done to improve their website’s SEO. Sometimes all it takes to improve SEO is a little evaluation and tweaking.

Webmasters have two choices: Pay to hire a professional search engine marketer or learn to do it themselves. Either way, webmasters will still need some method for on-going monitoring and evaluation of their website.

This is marketing essential-keeping a website tweaked to optimum advantage.

SEO is critical to your website as it climbs up the search engine ranks. Many small on-line business owners with limited funds may choose the do-it-yourself “sweat equity” option. If you choose to learn basic SEO skills rather than hire a professional search engine marketer, this information may help you avoid some costly mistakes.

And even if you choose to hire a professional search engine marketer, you still may not get the kind of results you want. So either way, learning SEO skills is a valuable asset to gain. It will equip you to better understand marketing strategies geared toward search engines instead of just customers. It will also help you to learn more about your business competition and the on-line business market.

Basic Questions to Ask Whenever Evaluating SEO

If you think you have done everything you can to improve SEO to your website, ask yourself these three simple questions:

Have I done my best to produce search engine friendly content?

Have I chosen my key words wisely?

Have I taken full advantage of social networking?

The first two questions should be obvious to any website owner. As for the third, the social networking revolution is phenomenal. Actively participating in several social networking sites can help you establish yourself, your reputation, and help provide outside links to your website. Most social networking sites serve as a method of free or low cost advertising for your business and increase SEO to your site.

If you answered these three basic questions in the affirmative, check out the following list of 10 commonly identified mistakes that affect SEO. They are all fairly basic, easy to identify, and relatively easy to fix.

SEO Mistake #1–Duplicate Title tags

The title tag is the first line of the site link that search engines display on the search results page. It also appears at the top of the web browser whenever a web page is displayed. Inexperienced webmasters may mistakenly use their company business name as the title tag for all web pages on their website. Avoid this costly mistake by ensuring all pages on your website have different title tags so search engines don’t discount their importance.

SEO Mistake #2–Duplicate Meta Tag Descriptions

Multiple pages with duplicate meta tag descriptions suffer in SEO rankings. Eliminating misused duplicate meta tags is an easy correction to help improve SEO.

SEO Mistake #3–Overuse of Same Word in Meta Tag

Another costly, but easily avoided mistake is repeating the same word in the meta tag more than 3 times. This is considered spamming by the search engines and has the exact opposite affect of SEO. Omitting a meta tag is preferable over penalization for spamming.

SEO Mistake #4–Title Page Doesn’t Match Keyword Phrase

This can not be understated. It is very important that your title page matches the keyword or keyword phrase it was optimized for. Also, always make sure the keyword is the first word in the page title whenever possible.

SEO Mistake #5–Inappropriate Keyword Tags

Keyword tags should only contains keywords found on that one particular web page.

SEO Mistake #6–Too Many Links on a Page

Too much internal linking can be a real problem and cause the search engine spider to quit indexing your website before it is actually finished. Google advises websites to never have more than 100 links on a page. Half that amount is probably better.

SEO Mistake #7–Links With Images Instead of Text

Web designers may like the visual appeal of linking with images, but from an SEO perspective they are totally counter productive-hindering rather than helping your goal of SEO.

SEO Mistake #8–Using Java Script, Flash, or Image Map to Navigate

Always use site links with anchor text pointing to a page optimized for that particular anchor text. This is the ideal method of linking for optimum SEO results.

SEO Mistake #9–Stuffing Key Words with Too Many Links

If you stuff too many links with the same keyword onto one page, it will risk being viewed as spamming by the search engines. This will result in a spiraling decline in your site’s SEO status. Being overly cautious in this regard is preferable to risking SEO penalization for spamming.

SEO Mistake #10–Too Few Page Links

Pages with only one incoming link are never ranked well and may even be placed in Google’s supplemental index. Think of it as the equivalent of an on-line “File 13″ or “dead letter box.” Once a web page is placed in this index it is very difficult to work out.

In conclusion, if you are a “do-it-yourself” webmaster with a small marketing budget, these SEO tricks can improve overall SEO and traffic to your website. Webmasters with less time to devote to SEO tasks should consider outsourcing to a professional. Purchasing professionally recommended SEO software is another viable option worth considering.