Search Engine Mistakes

In the never ending struggle to reach the front page of search engine results pages there are a few techniques that need to be avoided at all costs. Whether done accidentally or intentionally, these methods will get you penalized by the search engines and you will see your ranking and position fall to the end of the line.

The first big mistake many people make is in not fully understanding the importance of specific, relevant keywords. When you have optimized your page for the wrong; usually too generic, keywords, you will find that the search engines will overlook your site most of the time. Even if you rank at the top of a seldom used keyword you will not get much if any traffic as no one is typing that word into the search boxes. Good keyword research will prevent this mistake from happening to you.

While the keywords in your Meta tags are important, avoid overfilling the keyword tag. If you list everything on the page as a keyword and end up with a long string of words in this tag, the search engines will automatically consider it “spamming” and will penalize your page for it. Sticking with a few extremely relevant words will gain you better results with no penalties.

Overusing your keywords in the body copy of your site will also be considered “spamming”. The best saturation of your keywords in your text and headers is usually between one and a half to three percent of total words. Anything over that will begin to make the page seem unfriendly or convoluted to your actual human viewers.

Some people will try to create different pages to appeal to the different guidelines of the various major search engines. Not only will this create a lot of unnecessary and very similar pages on your website, but will likely be considered duplicate copy by all the engines anyway. It would not even be worth considering the nightmare this would create in trying to keep updating these extraneous pages.

Hidden text is probably the worst way to try and increase keyword saturation without writing good optimized copy. This practice is where a website will inject copy onto the page in the same color as the background. It is hoped that while people don’t see it and be bothered with strained copy, the search engines which just look at the code will think the page is optimized. This is a bad move as over the years this trick has been caught and now it will usually get your site permanently banned when it is discovered.

If a page is almost entirely built with graphics, you have the problem of there being virtually no text on the page for the search engines to read and they will consider it a blank page. If you were to write enough copy for the alt tags to overcome this, you should just go on and put the text on the page where everyone can see it. A totally flash created page has proven to be even worse than all pictures when it comes to search engine crawling. Always make sure there is something to read on the page.

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