Starting your own SEO campaign is a rewarding and worthwhile task, but the process is littered with pitfalls leading many people to fall at the first hurdle. Many of these mistakes are easy to avoid, so with that in mind, here are the top SEO mistakes to steer well clear of.

1. Leaving it too late.

Even when they know the importance of SEO many people fall into the trap of starting their campaign too late. It’s no good building your website without considering technical applications that will help the SEO process (like an SEO-friendly content management system). Remember, it’s easier to start early than have to retrace your steps and make changes later.

2. Using anchor text badly

Too many sites use anchor text such as “click here” or “more” for internal site links where they should be using words or phrases to help search engines understand what the target page is about.

3. Targeting the wrong keywords

Many people make this mistake by using keywords that they believe describes what their site does, but in reality a member of the public would never search for. Picking the right keywords is integral to the success of your SEO campaign, so choose wisely. If you need some help, try using one of the many free online keyword suggestion sites.

4. Building a Flash website without an HTML alternative

Flash may look pretty but it’s far from attractive to search engines. If you feel a Flash-based website is necessary, then make sure you provide an HTML version too as search engine spiders can’t read Flash content (although they are making strides to index text within Flash objects) and therefore cannot index it.

5. Over optimising your pages

Now I know I’ve been banging on at you about SEO and you’re now probably raring to go but first, a word of warning: don’t overdo it. Throwing in keyword after keyword in your pages will make the experience worse for your user and look like you are more bothered about SEO rankings than your customers. You don’t want to look like a spammer – don’t overdo it.

6. Concentrating too much on meta tags

Too many people believe the keyword meta tags is an important part of their SEO campaign, when in reality, it is pretty much obsolete. By all means create your meta tag keywords but don’t expect big results – concentrate your efforts on; unique user friendly URLs, page titles and descriptions; building great content and acquiring quality links.

7. Trying to do everything on your own

These are all things that you can avoid without any help, but to really start climbing the search engine rankings you are going to need some help. There is some excellent SEO software which will help you manage your SEO, record your progress, build links and compare yourself with your competitors, all for as little as £99 a month. You can only do so much yourself and investing in SEO software is an important step if you want your website to be successful.