It doesn't really matter what kind of website you have or what online business you run, you'll always need targeted traffic. To go about this, you must get your site ranked high in the search engines. When you go about SEO the right way, you will get that target audience and that audience will usually be ready to act. However, you can't just wing SEO, and you need to know which mistakes to avoid if you hope to be successful.

Your site should be appealing to the search engines, not pushed out completely. This is why it's essential that you pay attention to what you can't do if you hope to be successful. You are about to read some blunders you shouldn't make if you hope to get that targeted traffic that converts.

Using graphics and images can be a great way to enhance any website, but putting too many up will actually be damaging your SEO efforts. Search engines look for quality content that matches what a visitor is searching for, so having too many images reduces the amount of content your site has. The text that appears on images is not like the plain text you have on your pages. Search engines can't read text shown on images, which means you won't be benefiting with your SEO efforts at all. If you do use graphics, be sure to put your chosen keywords within the ALT attribute for each image. Search engines are able to read the ALT tags attributed to images and graphics, which can give your rankings a bit of a boost. Your website's speed matters, not only to your visitors but also to the search engines. Websites that contain a lot of convoluted or messy coding can load much slower, which can be a mistake when it comes to appeasing Google. If you can, aim at switching to an external CSS file instead of all internal code. When you have an external CSS file, it helps your page to remain light and keeps the loading process smooth. Just keep in mind that search engines are looking out to give the best results to their users, and to convince them, you have to become the best. In other words, your site should behave well with your visitors and as well as the search engines.

Another common SEO mistake is having a poor title and description, which will eventually result in bad search engine ranking. Search engines use the title and description to try and figure out which theme is predominant within your text content and then rank you accordingly. Compared to a few years ago, search engines and their algorithms for determining rankings have evolved, so pay attention to these elements. In conclusion, successful SEO is a combination of multiple elements. Blackhat techniques may offer instant solutions to get your site ranked and bring in the traffic, but none of these are long term. So you should always concentrate on whitehat SEO that not only offers a long term solution but also brings in traffic that you can count on, without getting your site banned.