"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.
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