"Do
You Make These
Search Engine Positioning Mistakes?"
By
Arun Agrawal
Search
Engine Positioning
is the art of optimizing your web site so that it gets into
a high position on the search engine results page whenever
someone searches for keywords that relate to your products and
services.
However,
some people make basic mistakes while designing their
web site and as a result, never make it to the top. Even if
they work hard on it! Or may be waste a lot of money on useless
tools and services.
Do
you make these mistakes too?
1.
Designing a Frames-based web site
This
one is the biggest loser of them all. Frames may make the job
of maintaining a very big and complicated web site easy but
search engine absolutely hate them. Most of the search engines
cannot find out their way easily through them and end up indexing
only the home page.
Now
imagine this. One of your internal pages has been reported by
the search engines and the user has clicked on it. What a mess!
The page looks orphan without the outer frame and the navigation.
Lose
your frames right away. You will start getting positive
improvements the moment you redesign your site without frames.
2.
Having an all-Flash or graphic-only home page
This
is another classic mistake. Many designers design web site home
pages like brochures. A beautiful cover which has to be opened
to read. But on the Internet every click takes away some prospects.
Did they click your ENTER button or the Back button?
You
see, search engines need content to index. If you don't have
content on the home page but only a Flash movie or a big animated
graphic, how will the search engine know what you deal in. And
why will it give you a high enough ranking?
3.
Not having a good title
What's
your title, Sir?
A
good title is an absolute must for getting a good search engine
position and the most vital thing -- the click-through. With
the title, you are always walking a tightrope. You need a title
with your most important keyword near the beginning but it should
still appeal to the human reading the results.
Don't,
don't stuff it with the keywords. How does this look to you
--
Search
engine position, search engine positioning, search engine ranking
If
you saw this in the search engine results, will you click on
this or you will prefer-
Top
10 Search engine positioning mistakes!
4.
Hosting your site with a FREE host
It
takes away all your credibility. You want to do business from
your web site. Right? And you can't even afford a decent web
hosting package. How do you expect your prospect to trust you?
Most
of the search engines do not spider web sites hosted on the
free hosts. Even if they do, they rank them quite low. How many
geocities web sites have you seen in the top 10?
Also,
will you be comfortable buying your merchandise from someone
who can't even afford a small shop? And web site hosting is
much cheaper!
Do
you want your visitor to look at your message or look
at the pop-up that your free web host popped over your site?
Go
get a good web hosting package right away.
5.
Putting all links on Javascript
Google
and many other search engines don't read and process JavaScript.
So if you have all your links on JavaScript only, Google is
blind to them.
You
must have at least one text-based link to all the pages
that you want to link to. And the anchor text (the visible text
on the site) should contain your important keywords, not "Click
here".
6.
Stuffing lots of keywords in the keywords tag
Do
you have a keywords tag that lists all the words related to
your product in a big long series? This is a certain recipe
to invite negative points.
While
many search engines have already started to ignore keywords
tag precisely because of this misuse, you should have
the keywords tag for the search engines that still use them.
It also serves as a reminder of the keywords that you are optimizing
for.
However,
put only the 2-3 most important keywords in there. Here's a
quick test - don't put any term in the keywords tag if it does
not appear at least once on the body copy.
7.
Not having any outgoing links
Do
you know why the Internet is called the Web? Because the web
sites link to each other. If you are only having incoming links
but don't have any outbound links, it is not appreciated by
the search engines as it violates the web-like structure of
the Web.
Because
some people try to conserve PageRank (a proprietary index used
by Google to measure link popularity), they avoid having any
outbound links. This is one big myth. You can get very
good points if you have some outbound links with keyword-rich
anchor text and preferably keyword-rich target URL also.
Of
course, you should not turn your web page into a link-farm.
There should be a few good links amidst some good content.
8.
Insisting on session variables and cookies to show information
Session
variables are used extensively by ecommerce-enabled sites. This
is to trace the path used by the visitor. Shopping cart and
various other applications also benefit by using session variables.
However it should be possible to visit the various information
related and sales pages without needing to have session variables.
Since
you can't put cookies on the search engine spiders, they can't
index your pages properly if the navigation requires
cookies and session variables.
9.
Regularly submitting your site to the search engines
"We
will submit your site to the top 250,000 search engines every
month for only $29.95." Who has not seen these ads or received
Spam with similar messages?
And
which are those 250,000 search engines? There are only about
8-10 top search engines worth bothering about. And a handful
of directories.
With
most of the search engines, you only need to submit once to
get spidered and then they will keep your listing fresh by crawling
your site at regular intervals. All you need to do is to keep
adding fresh content to your site and the search engines will
absolutely love you. In fact, Google prefers to locate you through
a link and not through the URL submission page.
For
some sites like DMOZ, if you
resubmit while you are waiting to be indexed, you entry is pushed
to the end of the queue. So you can resubmit regularly and never
get indexed :(
10.
Optimizing for more than 2 or 3 search terms
It
is virtually impossible to optimize a page for more than 2-3
keywords without diluting everything. Don't try to work on more
than 3 phrases on one page. Split.
Get
similar phrases together and work on those in this page. Take
2 or 3 out of the other phrases and develop a new page with
entirely new copy. Remember, you cannot just copy the same page
and squeeze these new phrases in there. It will look very funny
to the visitor.
Arun
Agrawal is an Internet Marketing specialist. He offers guaranteed Top 10 ranking services at www.SEOtop10.com
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