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SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)ARTICLES
Top SEO Mistakes by Beginners
The 5 Most Common SEO Mistakes
By Kalena Jordan
Having been in the business of optimizing web sites
for high search engine rankings for over five years
now, I have come across a number of "optimized"
sites that use search engine optimization (SEO)
techniques that are just plain WRONG.
Most of these sites were optimized by persons just
starting out; SEO beginners not yet familiar enough
with the industry to determine SEO fact from SEO
fiction. But what's scary is that some of the sites
I've seen using incorrect methods have been optimised
by so called search engine optimization "experts"
who really should know better.
Some common themes develop amongst incorrectly optimized
sites. Could YOU be making the same errors with
your site? To find out, let's look at the five most
common search engine optimization mistakes:
1) Non Utilization of the Title Tag
How many times have you looked at a web site where
the browser title reads "Welcome to [company name]'s
web site" or simply "[Company Name]"? Nothing wrong
with that, I hear you say? Well if you want to achieve
high search engine rankings, there's PLENTY wrong
with it.
You see, while it may not be common knowledge amongst
web designers, most search engines index the content
of title tags and consider it to be one of the most
important factors in their relevancy algorithm.
What you place in your title can make or break your
ranking for particular search terms on the various
engines. If you don't include your most important
search phrases within your title tag, you are overlooking
a vital opportunity in your quest for higher search
rankings.
Having said this, you should try and keep your title
tag to a maximum of 200 characters, as that is the
average limit most search engines will truncate
to. If you really insist on including your company
name in your title and you're willing to sacrifice
good keyword real estate to do so, put it at the
very end of the tag, because search engines give
more relevancy "weight" to content at the start
of your tag.
2) Use of Untargeted Keywords and Phrases
Another common mistake made by webmasters and SEO
learners is their choice of keywords placed in the
META keyword tag. Sure it might seem logical to
target the word "printers" if you run a printer
repair business in Ohio, but think about it - even
if you succeeded in ranking well for such a competitive
term (you won't), how many of the people visiting
your site as a result of this search would leave
as soon as they saw your home page? That's right,
most of them. All the people who wanted to buy printers,
all the people looking for businesses outside Ohio,
all the people not looking specifically for printer
repairers.
Does it become clear now that targeting such a generic
word is a waste of time? What you need to do instead
is optimise your site for search terms and phrases
that are highly targeted to your precise business.
Use a tool such as Wordtracker.com (keyword location
software) 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.
3) A Lack of Optimized Body Text
This one is very common. How often do you visit
a home page that is made up entirely of graphics?
You know the ones - they consist of an enormous
Flash file or maybe a large logo or a montage of
images, but the thing they have in common is a distinct
lack of text. Think they look professional? Think
again. No matter what you read or hear, if a site
has no text on the home page, it hasn't been correctly
optimized and has little chance of ranking well
in the search engines. Now that's unprofessional
in my opinion.
Beginner SEO's often make the mistake of creating
an optimized title tag and META tags and believing
their work is done. WRONG. If you want a web site
to rank well in the search engines, you need to
give them what they want to see - visible content
that is optimized just as well as the invisible
content. That means adding keyword-filled body text
to any page you want ranking high. Why? Because
most search engines can't index images. Some engines
don't even index META tags anymore. So a site with
no visible content becomes effectively invisible
to a search engine and has almost no chance of appearing
in the rankings for logical searches.
Also, search engine algorithms have become smarter
and are now checking that sites contain highly relevant
content before including them in their index. If
you expect to rank well for a particular keyword
or phrase, it's not too much to expect to find that
keyword or phrase within your site is it?
4) Submitting to 1,000 Search Engines
I love this one. I've lost count of how many banner
ads or web sites I've seen boasting "We'll submit
your site to 1,000 search engines!" I can't believe
the hype is still prevalent that you need to submit
a web site to thousands of search engines in order
to receive traffic. This is just NOT TRUE.
In fact, studies show that approximately 90% of
search traffic still comes from the 10 major U.S.
search engines and directories (listed here: http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/List_of_Search_Engines.htm
). Companies that advertise submission to thousands
of search engines are usually including in that
list minor engines or directories that utilize the
databases of major engines anyway (so don't require
submission) or a large number of Free For All (FFA)
sites. Submitting your site to FFA pages can damage
your site's reputation in the search engines, because
they consider FFA sites to be of very low quality
and utilizing spamdexing techniques in an attempt
to falsely inflate a site's link popularity. I've
even seen examples of sites being banned from a
search engine for having their pages listed on FFA
sites by ill-informed webmasters without the site
owner's knowledge.
If you are targeting specific geographic markets,
you might like to submit your site to the most popular
regional search engines in those countries, but
the fact is that most people worldwide continue
to use the U.S. versions of search engines such
as Yahoo and AltaVista despite the fact that there
are local versions available. The bottom line? Get
your site listed on the 10 most popular search engines
and directories and you will have the major worldwide
traffic sources covered.
5) Resubmitting Too Soon and Too Often
So you've optimized your site and submitted it to
the most important search engines. But it's been
three weeks and you haven't received any traffic.
Time to resubmit, right? WRONG. Depending on the
search engine, they can take up to twelve weeks
to include your site in their index. Each search
engine and directory work to their own time frame.
You need to check their average submission times
(a chart is here: http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/search_engine_indexing.htm)
and be patient.
So when you're in, what then? You should regularly
submit to ensure you're ranked above your competitors,
maybe once a month or once a week, right? WRONG
AGAIN. Once you're in a search engine's database,
there is no need to resubmit your site. It's pointless
actually, because they already know about your site
and their robot is scheduled to revisit and reindex
all sites in the database on a regular basis. Resubmitting
wastes everybody's time and can actually get your
URL permanently banned from a search engine for
"spamdexing".
The only time you need to resubmit your site to
a search engine is if your URL changes or if your
domain suddenly drops out of their database entirely.
NOT if your ranking drops, NOT if your content changes,
but if the domain is actually nowhere to be found
in the index (this can happen from time to time
as the search engines Spring clean their databases).
A good SEO will monitor your rankings regularly
(monthly is fine) and only resubmit when absolutely
necessary.
So those are the five most common SEO mistakes.
Any sound familiar? Don't worry, you're in good
company. Now that you've recognized the problem
areas and are better equipped with the correct information,
you'll be able to reverse the damage.
-------------------------
Copyright © Kalena Jordan 2001-2002
About the Author:
Article by Kalena Jordan, CEO of Web Rank.
Kalena was one of the first search engine optimization
experts
in Australasia and is well known and respected in
her field.
For more of her articles on search engine ranking
and online
marketing, please visit http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com
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