It does not matter whether you are new to SEO or not; it is equally possible for a seasoned campaigner to fall into a trap as it is for an amateur. There are a few pitfalls that tend to pop up consistently which create more hurdles than you would expect from your SEO program. The good news, however, is that this situation can be reversed and full advantage can be taken of SEO, which is a great technique in the eCommerce business.

5 Pitfalls And How To Avoid Them
Below are a few pitfalls that tend to limit the return from your SEO program and are often overlooked.

• Don’t use Flash on your page. Granted that Flash is a good tool that can be used for animations in different presentations, but keeping SEO in mind, it has the potential to cause much harm to your page ranking. This is because search engine spiders are unable to translate the content embedded in flash files. Therefore, they are not indexed.
• Do not use invisible text. This might be an obsolete SEO strategy, but it definitely deserves a mention as even today people try to take advantage of it. Invisible text is used by some sites in an effort to manually increase the keyword relevance. Search engine filters have increased dramatically over the past few years and would be asking too much to get anything out of this technique. In the worst case scenario, you might even get banned from search engines.
• Get rid of the splash page. The initial homepage with a video, logo or even a flash animation is a bad idea for more reasons than just SEO. This page is essentially substituted for the home page and all the links to the site will point to this page, which has little text to be indexed by the spider. Remember that splash pages tend to drive visitors away because humans are impatient by nature. Instead of waiting for an extra page to load, they will move on and look for something else.
• Do not use duplicate or plagiarized content. This is something everyone who is into SEO knows and does not even need mentioning. However, judging by the number of people out there who expect to get results from this strategy, it is worth a mention. Duplicate content will drastically affect ranking and the results provided by the search engines will be a lot less relevant.
• Use titles that match the content of the page. The headings of web pages are treated by search engines as one of the deciding factors to determine the ranking when keywords related to the site are searched.

Expect More Pitfalls In The Future
The search algorithms of search engines including Google are constantly evolving and trying to match the behavior of humans as much as possible.  So do not be surprised if an update is released that would leave you no choice but to restart your SEO program from scratch.

The author, Scott Heron, is an SEO consultant and offers his consultancy services as a freelancer from Edinburgh. He has extensive experience in content marketing and SEO. Scott can be reached on his website Scott Heron Dot Me.