Top Seven Mistakes

1) Non-descriptive page titles - Search engines see pages with the same title on the domain as duplicate pages and won't index past the same title twice. Provide your web developer with a short 7-9 word descriptive title for each page and make sure each page title on your site is unique.

2) No meta tags in page - If you don't put a description meta tag on your page and it gets listed, it will list the first few words of copy on your page. Supply your web developer with your keyword and description meta tags when submitting each page's content.

3) Thinking if you build it, they will come - you watch too many movies.. here's your reality check. Submitting your site to the search engines is not enough. Without good optimization efforts, you can't compete for keyword rankings on a global basis.

4) It has to be pretty - that depends largely on the purpose of the site. For the most part, design is subjective. What looks good to one person is unattractive to the next. The search engines don't care what your graphics or animation or color scheme is. It just has to be well organized, well-written, user friendly, consistent, logical to navigate, provide a valuable service and be 'sticky'. Killer sites aren't just aesthetically pleasing, they are highly useful, well planned and easy for the search engines to crawl. The design grabs their attention, the content keeps it.

5) Too much animation - Animation has it's place and can be quite clever and appropriate on a lot of sites if used to the best advantage, but too much of it is unnecessary and will aggravate visitors.

6) Different design for each page or section - How will your visitors know they are still on your site if it's pages are not consistent? You can guarantee consistency by making sure the site is designed with the navigation in the same place on each page and your logo in the same spot at the top of the page. If you have expandable menu items, put them on every page of your site in the same place. Your visitors will expect it to be there and it's not user centered if they have to learn a new navigation system for each section. Use consistent navigation on every page. A different design and way to navigate it for each section is confusing.

7) Main focus - You can have several topics on your site, and indeed you should have for interest and support. But there should only be one main focus that tells what your site is all about. One main subject that lets your visitor know exactly what most of your content is. What is the purpose of your site? Spell it out with your headlines, tag line and graphics. If it's not apparent by looking at the main page, your visitors have no reason to dig deeper.

There are a lot more mistakes site builders can make, some biggies and some minor, but correcting the ones listed here will make the biggest impact on your site as a whole and the ability to get it listed properly, and they're so easy to correct.