It has become very popular for website owners to try to optimize their own websites with the goal of increasing traffic and sales. They know the importance of SEO and rather than look to the professionals, they opt to try their hand at SEO. This can be done, however, many site owners, as well as some professionals in the SEO arena, make mistakes. Here are the top search engine optimization errors that I have seen.

Content: If you don’t have quality and unique content, you most likely won't get your website to rank well. Before optimization efforts are put forth, make sure that you have useful information and not just pages of links and ads. As the realtor says "location, location, location", the search engine optimizer says "content, content, content".

The Meta Keyword Tag: It used to be common practice to stuff all of your keywords into the Keyword Meta Tag. Unfortunately, many novices that are trying to optimize their sites still use this practice. Now a days, this tag has very little impact on search engine rankings.

Poor or No Keyword Analysis: would you go on a trip without a roadmap or construct a building without blueprints? Many website owners try to optimize their site for search engines without having any idea as to the querires that their potential clients are usinging on the engines. Do your homework and research your keywords prior to optimization.

Title Tag: After providing good content, to the search engines, the Title Tag is the most important area of your website. This tag typically weighs heavily within their algorithms. Many site owners don't customize this tag for each page based on their keywords and only include things like the page name, such as ‘products’ or the company name in the Title Tag of every page.

JavaScript Navigation: JavaScript menus do not typically get crawled by the search engine spiders. Google says that they do spider some of these links now, however, it is still not a guarantee. This means that if you don’t have any other links on your site pointing to your inside pages, the search engines won’t find them and you obviously won't rank well. If you include JavaScript navigation, make sure that the search engines have a way to spider and index your pages.

Image Navigation: Search engines can spider image hyperlinks, however, they can not read the text. The website will not benefit from hyperlink text, which does have a significant place in the search engine algorithms.

Completely Flash Website: If your site is strictly Flash, regardless of the quality content you have, you typically won’t rank well. The search engines can not read the text and content with Flash. If you do want to have strictly flash site, have a related html site.

Backlink Spam: Just because you read that link popularity will increase your ranking doesn't mean you should be trying to build links from anyone. A link building strategy should be carefully put together with each link carefully analyzed to ensure that you aren't asking for a link from a black listed site.