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A Few Mistakes in Search Engine Optimization

In Search Engine Optimization, SEO, there are many mistakes to be made. Below is a list of a few most common mistakes that website owners do.

Badly Designed Websites
If your website is designed badly i.e. lack of proper navigation, using frames to save on design times, and large graphics which takes more time to load, and reduce text that you would use instead of the image, these all makes effect on listing in Search Engine. Search engine spiders can actually be blocked from crawling sites that are not well-designed. Therefore a proper web design is very important part of search engine optimization.

In many sites, images and other script languages are used for fine looks. These are good but not crawl-able i.e. not advisable for search engine optimisation. Try to make your useful links in HTML rather than using images or use of other web script languages. If your page layout change then place HTML link on bottom of your page. It is also good chance to use keywords in anchor text.

Large image size will cause more time to download page, people don’t have time to wait for long time. Make your images in more pieces so it will take less time than single image. Try to make low resolution file where high resolution graphics are not required. If it is essential to use large images then consider using thumbnails and open it in separate page. This may give additional benefit of creating more pages and more text that spiders and bots crave.

Badly written of Content
If we have to rate single largest factor for high ranking in search engine i.e. “content”.

Clarity of content written in site is a very important aspect for search engine spiders, search engine and directory users. If your content is badly written and not relevant to what you want to find for or content which are never updated, than your site is neither search engine friendly nor user-friendly. Well-written content is what search engine spiders feed on, and content is the key to high rankings. In addition, your content absolutely must have targeted keywords and phrases. If content is written properly, you can make more targeted keyword and appropriate phrases.

Ideally, you will use those words throughout your copy frequently and may also include them in bold or italics to show search engines that those words are very important in the scope of the page!

Absence of targeted keyword and phrases can break your site. When users go to search engine and type particular keyword related to your site, but if you have not entered that keyword in your body text than your site will not come in listing.

Another common mistake made by some SEO professional is their choice of keywords placed in the META keyword tag. Make sure it might seem logical to your content.

Any irrelevant keyword or phrase can increase your ranking but think about it – even if you succeeded in ranking well for such a competitive term that you don’t want, how many of the people visiting your site as a result of this search would leave as soon as they see your home page? That’s right, because most of them don’t find what exactly they are looking for. Misspellings, odd spacing, and product feature-specific variations should also be considered. Thorough keyword research can save money and future disappointments.

Does it become clear now that targeting such a generic word is a waste of time? What you need to do instead is optimize your site for search terms and phrases that are highly targeted to your precise business. Use a tool such as Word tracker to find what people are actually typing in to the search engines to find goods and services similar to yours and concentrate on ranking well for those terms. The more qualified your site visitors are, the more likely you are to convert those visitors into paying customers.

Replica of Content
Do not copy content from other’s website. When Search engines compares your site with other site; if your page is updated later that it consider your site as spamming and it may result into penalty or low ranking of your site. If you use duplicate pages means if you prepare more than one pages with different name and link but if content in page are same search engine will considered as trick and it definitely affect your ranking.

Also, search engine algorithms have become smarter and are now checking that sites contain highly relevant content before including them in their index.

Improper use of Meta Tags or Site without Meta Tags
Without Meta tags or improper Meta tags can misguide search engine for irrelevance search that may cause improper listing of your website. Meta tags are used to include Keyword and description tags. It is reserved part especially for search engines. Meta tags help search engines for quick search. It is also helpful to increase ranking in search engines. Make sure to include these Meta tags in all page of your site, and target them for each individual page.

If your website is good in content and also have proper keywords, but not place page title or not used descriptive and appropriate page title than it might harm your ranking. It is better to have different title on every page also use descriptive page title.

Use your title tag, URL, and H1 tags when optimizing site. In a website these are the three most simple and most important for search engine, when it comes to search engine optimization.

Absence of Sitemap for website with more than 10 pages
Without sitemap, user need to search entire site for the content he is searching for which is very tedious and sometime user may quit without going further. For the reason it is very important to prepare sitemap in the website to help searcher and search engine. Sitemap assist web crawlers in indexing websites more efficiently and effectively. Sitemap provides structure of entire site in one page which is very useful for search engine optimization. The sitemap drives the search engine to go directly to the page instead of search for links. This helps a lot in optimization of website in search engines.

Google has introduced an option for generating sitemap of your website. Google sitemaps is an easy way to tell Google about all the pages on your site, which pages are most important to you, and when those pages change, for a smarter crawl and fresher search results.

Google Sitemaps also answers questions you might have about how Google sees your site.

Page Cloaking
The website that contains contents that is specially designed for the search engine is called cloaking site. The search engine checked IP address and keywords of the search query. There are cloaking techniques where the homepage is altered to each and every keyword to make search engine think that your site contains very relevant contents especially designed for the queried keyword or key phrase. Cloaking can result in a penalty that may damage your business as well as ranking.

Over optimisation affects your web site
When you put weight only on search engine ranking then it becomes over optimisation. When you prepare content in your site with more numbers of keywords i.e. keyword stuffed body text; having a too high keyword density may cause an over optimization penalty. This also applies to your page title, your Meta description and Meta keywords, as well as the ALT attributes of your images. That means you can not place stuff of keywords as body text in the site. Therefore, avoid optimizing your pages very much by all way. Try to make website for human being rather than making for search engine robot.

Absence of Back Links or broken links
Your site must be link properly. For example if you open some page in new window and there is no back link or any navigation in that page to return main page than it is just as a deserted island. The other example is if you have placed banner of some of your partner or relevance to your business, when user click on that link and you have not place back link than user may not find way if he wants to back to your site.
It is a good way to link sites that are related to your business and ask them to link of your website. But take care of proper linking. Try and think in terms of traffic and avoid the page rank trap. If a link will bring your site traffic then go for it. If you are in a highly competitive market try to build quality links.

Inadequate Marketing Plan
Ranking will not help if you don’t know what your target market is. Your ranking has to lead with proper marketing strategy that hit your target audience and not just useless hits. Before spending time and money a perfect marketing plan is essential.

SEO - Tips to Optimize Your Webpage to Compete for a High Ranking

Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important to websites. If you rank high in search engines, your website are shown to a huge number of target users.To start with, you have to pick a list of target keywords. Try the google Adwords: Keyword tool for selecting the best keywords for your site.

Remember, be specific with your keywords! eg trying to rank well for “web Development” is going to be hard, but trying to rank well for “asp.net web development” is easier to achieve.

Go to google.com, search on the target keyword your website has planned to work on. Then check the top ranking website, learn from it, and do better.

How to do better? Here’s some basic practices…

1. place your optimizes keyword in titles, and make sure you have 1 title per page. to do this all you need to do is use the <h1> tag in very top of the page.

2. place keyword phases in a paragraph or 2 of text at the top of your site.

3. On your web page, set your first graphic with ALT set to your target keyword

4. build a text based sitemap, add ALT if it is an image

5. OPML / RSS site map

6. bold or underline keyword (1 or 2 times only)

7. The key word/phrase should be used again very near the end of the page.

8. try to register a good domain name with keyword (I guess keyword in subdirectory is ok)

9. navigation menu on the right, since google bot looks from top and left.

How Site Structure Can Effect Your Search Results

Site structure is a big part in not only Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) , But also making a very user friendly navigation system that’s easy to remember.

Some people over-do the navigation on their site using bad url’s or non optimized url’s. an example of these are:

• http://www.mysite.com/content.php?id=3

This is a non optimized url - i recommend looking at my The Power of Search Engine Friendly URLs post to combat this issue

• http://www.mysite.com/site/uk/products/computers/

Although your content is sectioned, which is good for your search engine optimization ( SEO ) , a user is never going to be able to remember this url if they want to come back. i recommend reducing this url to something like:

• http://www.mysite.com/products/Computers/

The country specific details can be dealt with in code, or for Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ), you should buy the .co.uk Domain for the UK sector.

The /Site/ folder is useless there are so many websites out there that section off their main website into a folder, it is pointless and also effects the ease of use of the navigation for the user.

This shorter structured type of URL is good for Ease of use, AND for sectioning off products for better seach enginge optimization, without overdoing it or going too far.

The other important thing to note about search engine friendly URLs , is your site should handle chopped url’s. for example if you have the path:

• http://www.mysite.com/products/Computers/

A user should be able to remove /Computers/ and see a list of all products on the url http://www.mysite.com/products/

Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) is always a balance, you wouldn’t want to over-do it and make a page impossible to use for your users, you need to make a compromise with Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) and ease of use.

The Importance of sitemap for website promotion

A sitemap is a web page that lists all the web pages on a website, typically organized in hierarchical way. Sitemap helps visitors and search engine bots to find pages on the site.
Sitemaps improves search engine optimization of a website by making sure that all the pages can be found. Sitemap is very important when a website uses flash or script menus that do not include HTML links.

How to prepare Search Engine Friendly Sitemap?

• Having text links of most important pages, it may have links to every page.
• Write short description related to link to inform visitor about your website.
• Provide a pathway for the search engine robots to follow in order to reach your most important web pages.
• Give your visitors the information about your site and show them how to reach the page they are looking for.
• To help automated search engine robot about what the page is about, write important keyword phrases in the sitemap text and hypertext links.
• Help search engine robots to find by giving link of static web pages instead of link to dynamically generated pages. The search engine may not otherwise find your page.
• It is good habit to have sitemap even for small website, adding a sitemap for visitors and for the search engine robots becomes the part of overall search engine optimization strategy.
• To make your sitemap most attractive to the search engine robots and visitors it is better to include meaningful text along with the page URLs and links. Use keywords in that text including appropriate content for each of the pages to which you link.
• Try to make easy navigation of your site; it is easy for search engine robots to find on your site, it increases chances of being positively listed in their search results. Having a number of properly interlinked web pages within a website would indicate to the search engine that the information architecture of the site is reliable and this would help you to achieve Top ranking in search engine.
• It is also very important for the sitemap to be in the main site directory so search engine spiders can easily find sitemap page and follow the links to assure your main site content is instantly accessible to spiders and visitors.
• Other important aspects in sitemaps, the link color for visited links should be different from that of non visited links so that visitors understand which pages they have already seen and thus, save time and sustain interest of visitor in your website.

What is Google Sitemap?

• Google sitemap is a tool established by Google to arrange an entire website in index order and keeping the latest update information on a website, easier on search engine. By adding a list of all the pages on your website, along with when those pages were last updated Google is able to easily update in its index.
• The goal of sitemaps is simple to provide website owners with a method of getting more pages in Google’s index and notifying Google about any recent updates. The problem with this is that Google is already fairly competent at indexing the majority of a website and predicting when a site is going to update itself. The result is that most website owners found it to be a lot of work for relatively little benefit.
• A final point to the importance of a sitemap - Google in its Webmaster Guidelines recommends that sites should have a sitemap.

A sitemap also helps you in planning your site before even you start developing it. Once you decide which pages you want, your job is actually made very simple when you start designing the web pages. A site structure helps in understanding the number of pages on the website and how they would be laid out. Thus, another important point is that a sitemap should actually be the first step in planning for a website.

Therefore the other most important reason the sitemap is vital because it helps the visitors to understand the website structure and layout and thus, quickly gain access to what your website has to offer.