Today I am going to write about 5 most common mistakes made when optimising your site for the search engines like google, yahoo or msn.com. If you are new to SEO do study them carefully and the search engines will love your site and rank it high in the results. But there are plenty of mistakes to be made, so don not be the one who is making them. Without further talking, let us go straight to the 5 most common SEO mistakes:

1. Using duplicate content

This is quite a common mistake. You start a blog or a website, make a few posts or some sub pages. But now you're getting too lazy to continue writing unique content (don not worry, happens lots of times to me too). And now you start copying text from other sites and putting it on your page. This is a NO-NO for google or other search engines. It will lower your page rank, lower your ranking for keywords related to your website and eventually ban you from the results altogether. So stay away from duplicate content.

2. Reciprocal linking with own domains (websites)

I have made this mistake myself many years ago. I thought:"Hey, why not link my domains together, so I'll get a better ranking in google!". Oh, was I wrong. You should never link your own domains together (for example put a link on domain1.com which points to domain2.com and the other way around too). Lower PR, lower ranking and if overused also a ban. You might try it, but it's very complicated (different website IP, different server, different registrar data, etc.) My advice - just do not do it!

3. Irrelevant backlinks

Now that you have a website, you should get some reciprocal links (or one way links, which are WAY better for your rankings - it means that a website is linking to you, but you are not linking back). But there are mistakes to be done here too. For example if your are selling computer keyboards on your website do not make link exchanges with sites that sell or are related to clothes. Find websites that match your website content and exchange links with those. Do not link (one way link) to websites that are not related to your content too.

4. Not using a "title" tag for your page

You really should always make a title for every page that you make. It is very simple to make one and it should be related to the content of the website. Leaving this empty will decrease your search engine position and people will find your products harder or even will not at all. It is really not that hard to do it.

5. Poorly written content, not optimised website

You might see this a lot of times. A site has only about 5 sentences of text, an image (that might even be broken - does not show), some fancy flash animation and colors which are really hard to read. Don't make those mistakes. Every webpage you make should have about 200 - 250 characters of well written text that is related to that website, have about 1 - 2% keywords in that text (for example if you're selling apples, use that keyword in the text of your website). Also use the keyword in the "title", "description" and even on the website under h1, h2 and h3 tags. And the alt tag of the images on your website should also contain a description of that picture. And use text and backgrounds that are easy to read (for example black text on a white background - a winner!).

There are lots of other small mistakes that can be make when designing your site for the search engines, but if you avoid these most common five, you should be on a good way to make your site search engine friendly and get good results. And do not forget to be patient, because patience is the key here. Thinking long-term is always the best method in search engine optimisation.