We are all proud of our websites and love to see them succeed. Like our children, though, we can sometimes overlook their faults. Or perhaps we have just paid a designer a lot of money for a new flashy site. It should already be SEO-friendly, right?

WRONG

Here is a list of common issues with many modern websites.

Image-heavy sites:

Do you have lots of pictures? Do you even have pictures of text? While it may look nice, if you do not have ALT text (what displays if the image is missing), Google, Yahoo! and others cannot understand the images. An image of a paragraph and an image of a giraffe appear identical to the search engines. Make sure you have ALT text specified for all your important images.

Javascript-heavy sites:

Search engines are in the very beginning stages of understanding javascript. They still do not do it well at all. Hiding your text and links behind javascript make them invisible to search engines.

Flash sites:

Flash-driven sites are basically interactive movies, which search engines do not watch. Many webdesigners love Flash because it is a chance to showcase their artistic ability. Unfortunately, it renders your content unreadable to search engines.

Unethical SEO:

If including a word in your copy makes that page relevant for that word, repeating it ad nauseum is a good way to get higher in the rankings, right? Not since the 90's, unfortunately. If links count as votes, can't you just buy links? Yes, you can, but these things are also ways to get banned from Google's index. If doing your own SEO, always remember that the goal is to make what you're doing look as natural as possible.