Have you tried any and everything to get the search engines to give your site a higher ranking? Why, then, aren’t you seeing any positive changes? Many new webmasters who try to optimize their site for the search engines forget the basic rules that they need to keep in mind. The rules search engines set for their ranking requirements are always being changing and the means of optimizing websites are changing as well. If you want to stay ahead of the crowd and see your site on the first page of Google, you need to avoid making the following mistakes. If you work on these, you’ll get more positive results, no matter how much money you have.

The most common SEO mistake made by new webmasters is that they try to use a lot of flash on their website. Flash may make a website cool, but it’s no good for 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. It’s the only way to achieve a higher place in the searches. You can still have your flash as long as you use text also so that the search engines can find your site. If you add more text, your site will do better. You should never just take content from other sites, as that’s not right. If you try to take content that’s not yours in the hopes that it will assist you with reaching your goals, you’re mistaken. Nobody may notice that your site is using plagiarized content at first, but eventually people will find out. The largest downfall is that the search engines have figured out how to get around this, and they can recognize content that’s been duplicated. There’s a filter that’s saved for duplicated content and if your website gets trapped in there, it won’t do a thing for your site’s ranking. That’s why it’s necessary to insert content that’s one of a kind that readers and the search engines will both enjoy.

You must build links in order to stay competitive but getting too many at once will alert Google that you are a possible spammer and they will penalize your site. 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. But this doesn’t work that way, as search engines like natural link building. Plain and simple, if you have a brand new site and it get hundreds or thousands of links pointing to it right away then Google will sandbox your site and de-index it. Link building is necessary in the competitive online environment of today but you will actually outrank your competition by getting links a few links a day, consistently.

Who knew that SEO was such a simple beast to tame? The more you practice optimizing your site, the better results you will get. The more backlinks the better.