Many companies, and even designers and developers, make mistakes while creating a website. If you’re looking to improve your ranking in the search engines, it’s helpful to knw what the common mistakes are –– so you can avoid them.

1. Splash page - The ‘intro’ pages with banner images or flashy graphics have fallen out of favor, not only in the design world, but with search engines. Flash is not indexed well and does you more harm than good.

2. Not utilizing the title tag. The spiders of most of the search engines crawl title tags first. Thus, your title tag should contain the most focused keywords. No need to stuff keywords (that’s a no-no), just keep the keywords relative to your business.

3. Duplicate content. Duplicate content is very common across sites. This hurts you, because it reduces the potential of being indexed in the search engines. Also, irrelevant keywords in the description and title tags are counterproductive for search engine rankings.

4. Keyword cannibalization. Using lots of unrelated keywords (keyword stuffing/spamming) is a huge no-no. Google indexes the content of your entire page, and they index only the relevant keywords. So adding unnecessary keywords is useless.

5. Poor URL selection. Many URLs are either too long or non-descriptive, often times just a sequence of meaningless letters or abbreviations. URLs should be easily read and recognizable, and ideally contain the most important keyword.