Things never to do with SEO

Today we are going to discuss some things you should avoid when optimizing your blog/website for search engines. Shall we begin?

SEO Spam and and paying to submit to directories.

Have you ever seen ads around the internet stating that they will submit your website to hundreds or thousands of search engines? How about 500 directories? Or maybe buying thousands of backlinks for a small price? Never give in to this, you just can’t buy this kind of work for $25.00 . Your site will be submitted to link farms of a directory. No SEO can gaurantee a number one ranking and for a small price your site won’t be submitted to all those directories and search engines. No true SEO is a spammer.

Have you ever put your content across several domains?

This is not something good to do unless you have a bulk user base and for certain content considerations. This will get a bunch of your sites in the SERPS so look up more about sub-domains and domains with search engine optimization. Submitting to search engines can’t hurt but really, only submit to a couple of the top ones. Usually you won’t have to do this because the search engines will automatically crawl your website when you are linked with a site that is being crawled.

Make your pages crawlable!

Now you never want to make your site to where a crawler can’t access it or crawl all of your pages you want. This happens when you don’t write your robots.txt file correctly. Also having sessions Id’s or too many variables in your urls can effect this. Always use words and keywords of your categories and topics in your urls. When you have a navigation menu you, never use all all images or flash. The crawlers cannot read these things. Unless you have a portfolio or something related, never use an all image or flash website period. Crawlers read the text in your site, the aren’t human and cannot read the text or images in flash.

For more information on optimizing your navigation menu’s and a better explanation on using text instead of flash and all images, check out a previous topic I wrote on optimizing your categories .

Targeting general keywords and why not to.

If you are starting a website or blog and if your website isn’t ranked well yet, never try to target general popular keywords that have a lot of competition. Always optimize for relevant specific keywords that will bring traffic that you targeted traffic. For example, you have a video game website and you decide to target the keyword “Gaming”. You will be blown away by competition without a chance, even if ranked decently. Try to rank for something more relevant than just general gaming and start off with some keywords that have lower competition and build your way up as you go up in ranking.

Keyword stuffing and irrelevant keywords.

This is a DON’T and you can get banned from it by Google. Stuffing your meta tags with irrelevant keywords means that these keywords have no relation to your website or topic. Google does not like this even though google does not base rankings off of meta tags anymore because it was too abused in the past it is still good to use them anyways. The max you should use is roughly 600-700 characters in a meta tag. Limit it to no more than about twenty targeted phrase of maybe two words or more. Make sure you separate them with commas of course. If you are using the same keyword avoid using it more than three to seven times. List them in the order of how important they are to your website and what you are trying to rank for. Do not use hidden keywords as text in your pages (people generally do this in the footer). Google considers this spam and will ban you for this. People do this by stuffing them in the footer and making the text the same color as the background color.

Avoid duplicate content.

Try to avoid this and avoid using the same titles in every page. If your page is on a certain topic, use the topics keywords in the title. Do the same with the pages of your categories. Don’t use www.blah.com and blah.com to direct to your homepage. Believe it or not, these both are two seperate addresses and will be considered duplicate content. Don’t link your home page with www.blah.com/index.html from www.blah.com either. Use the one address that you established for your website.

Site layout, structure , usablity.

Make sure that your site is optimized for both your users and search engine spiders. Use proper structure, navigation, descriptive links and text and headers. You want your website to look good and be easy to navigate your your users and visitors but at the same time you want it to where spiders will just eat your site and pages up. I stress again using text over images as much as possible.

Back-linking to relevant sites.

If your website is let’s say once again, about “Gaming” , don’t link to a weight-loss website because you have nothing in common. When building back links, you always want to build links between you and websites that are relevant and similar to what your website is about. This will work out for the both of you and eventually you can get more back links through those people.

Using anchor text and mixing it up.

When using anchor text, don’t use the exact same anchor text for each site that you are building a back link from. Switch it up. This is called unnatural link building. So vary up your keywords in your anchor text on different websites with keywords that are related to your site and related to words you are trying to rank for. If you don’t know what anchor text is, read up on a couple previous articles that I wrote that discusses Building Page Rank and Getting Indexed In Google fast .

Spamming your link.

I am sure you have seen tips on commenting in guest-books, blogs, forums and so on so fourth. There is a difference between posting comments with a link in it and spamming it. Most of the time, you have the option of including your link when posting in a blog or guest-book. In a forum you can include your link in your signature. Don’t just down right spam your link all over fast in hopes of getting traffic and links back to your site. This won’t help and you will get banned and more than likely your post will be deleted. Nobody likes a spammer, not even you.

Quit worrying about ranking.

Everyone seems to obsess and fret over Google page rank more than they should. If you keep up with the key fundamentals of running a website or a blog, your ranking will go up more and more as time goes on. Quit worrying about it because just focusing on this will end up cramping your style. Focus on keeping your site and/or blog updated with fresh unique content daily, interacting with your visitors, users, and other blog members, and keep doing basic SEO on your pages and you will be fine. Also, quit checking your rankings every single day. They are going to do what they are gonna do, let them be and stay focused.

This list can go on and on…and on! These are some key tips to running a successful site and keeping your optimization A-1. If you have any other tips feel free to comment.

SEO Techniques all websites should use

In this article I am going to discuss ten SEO Techniques that all websites should use. These are the basic fundamentals to successful website Search Engine Optimization.

1. Title Tag

Near the very top of a web site’s source code you’ll find various meta tags — the standard ones being the Title, Description and Keyword tags. The title tag is technically not a meta tag, though it is commonly associated with them. The title tag plays such a large role in the indexing of your web site, that it is considered the most important of the three.

A page title is the first thing a search engine will look at when determining just what the particular page is about. It is also the first thing potential visitors will see when looking at your search engine listing.

It’s important to include a keyword or two in the title tag — but don’t go overboard – you don’t want to do what’s known as “keyword stuffing” which does nothing but make your web site look like spam. Most people will include either the company name, or title of the particular page here, as well.

2. Meta Tags

There are two primary meta tags in terms of SEO — the description and the keyword tag. It’s debatable whether the search engines use the description tag as far as ranking your results. However it is one of the more important tags because it is listed in your search result — it is what users read when your link comes up and what makes them decide whether or not to click on your link.

Be sure to include a few relevant keywords in this tag, but don’t stuff it with keywords either. The description tag should read like a sentence — not a keyword list.

Due to “keyword stuffing” many search engines now completely disregard the keyword tag. It is no longer nearly as important as it was years ago, however it doesn’t hurt to include them in your source code.

When creating your keyword list, you’ll want to think of the specific terms people will type in when searching for a site like yours. Just don’t go overboard — too many duplicates are not a good thing (as in “web designer” “web designers” “custom web designer” “html web designer” “your state here web designer” – you get the idea). Those are all basically the same, so pick one or two variations at the most and move onto the next keyword.

3. Proper Use of Heading Tags

This is a very important element to consider when writing out your site copy. Use of heading tags helps users, web browsers and search engines alike know where the major key points of your copy are.

Your main page title should use the <h1> tag — this shows what your page is about. Use of additional tags, such as <h2> and <h3> are equally important by helping to break down your copy. For one, you’ll see a visual break in the text. But as far as the search engines are concerned, it will automatically know what your topics are on a page. The various heading tags give a priority to the content and help index your site properly.

4. Alt Attributes on Images

Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes. In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site. The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings.

In addition, including image alt attributes help the visually impaired who access web sites using a screen reader. They can’t see the image, but with a descriptive alt attribute, they will be able to know what your image is.

5. Title Attributes on Links

Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good web site will have. That’s the little “tool tip” that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links.

As a note, you should use descriptive text for your links. “Click here” doesn’t really tell a person – or more importantly, the search engines — what the link is. At the very least put a title tag that will explain that “Click Here” really means “Web Design Portfolio” for example. Better yet – make the main link text something like “View my web design portfolio” — this will give some value to the link showing that the resulting page is relevant to searches for portfolio’s.

6. XML Sitemap

XML sitemaps are used by the search engines in order to index through your site, as well.

This list of ALL pages / posts / etc. of your site also includes information such as the date the page was last modified, as well as a priority number of what you feel the most important pages of your sites are. All elements that help the search engines properly find and link to all content of your site.

7. Relevant Content

Having content relevant to your main page or site topic is perhaps the most important SEO aspect of a page. You can put all the keywords you want in the meta tags and alt image tags, etc — but if the actual readable text on the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it ends up basically being a futile attempt.

While it is important to include as many keywords in your page copy as possible, it is equally as important for it to read well and make sense. I’m sure we’ve all seen keyword stuffed pages written by SEO companies that honestly don’t make much sense from the reader’s point of view.

When creating your site copy, just write naturally, explaining whatever information you’re discussing. The key is to make it relevant, and to have it make sense to the reader. Even if you trick the search engines into thinking your page is great — when a potential customer arrives at the site and can’t make heads or tails of your information and it just feels spammy to them — you can bet they’ll be clicking on the next web site within a matter of seconds.

8. Link Building

We’ve probably all heard of Google Page Rank — it seems to be every web site owner’s dream to have as high a page rank as possible. While the algorithm for determining page rank encompasses many elements, and is constantly changing, one item is the number of links pointing to your web site.

Now, you’ll want to steer clear of link farms and other spammy attempts at getting links to your site. However there are many reputable and niche directory sites that you can use to submit your web site, or specific blog articles to.

With genuine content — especially if you have a blog — you’ll be able to generate links with other web sites and blogs, as well. It’s somewhat of a give and take, in that if you link out to other sites, you’ll find sites linking back to you — and hopefully see your page rank going up, as well!

9. Social Media

Although technically not SEO, Social Media is such a growing factor in getting your web site noticed, that it’s an important element to include in your plan.

Social media ranges from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — to social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and many more. There is a lot of relationship building involved, but as you build your own networks and build quality content on your web site or blog, you’ll see traffic to your web site increasing, as well.

As with any relationship, it is a give and take. Don’t just expect to join a site like Twitter for the pure sake of pushing your content. That just won’t fly — your true intentions will stick out like a sore thumb and do nothing but turn people off.

Even if you are on the site purely for networking reasons, the key is to make friends. Help out members of your network if they ask for a “retweet” or Digg, give helpful advice if asked, etc. You’ll see the same in return.

If you write a great post and have built meaningful relationships with peers in your niche, you’ll often find that friends will submit your posts and give you votes on the social bookmarking sites. The more votes you receive, the more likely your post is to be noticed by others and shared around, often resulting in additional link backs from other blogs, etc.

10. A Few SEO Don’ts — Flash and Splash

Along with any list of Do’s come the Don’ts. As far as SEO is concerned, two of these items are splash pages (often consisting of a flash animation) and all flash web sites.

Yes, flash is pretty! Full flash web sites can actually be amazing to look at — their own bit of interactive artwork. But unfortunately the search engines don’t get along well with Flash. Although there is talk of possible advancement in this area, for the most part the search engines cannot read Flash.

All that great content that you wrote for your site will not be seen by the search engines if it’s embedded into a Flash web site. As far as the search engines are concerned, your all flash web site might as well be invisible. And if the search engines can’t see your site content, a good chunk of potential customers will miss out on what you have to offer, too.

Equally as “pointless” are splash pages. Once very popular, the splash page should no longer be an important feature of any site. While splash pages used to serve as an introduction into a web site (often with a flash animation), it is no longer seen as helpful, and often times might actually annoy visitors.

For one — it’s an extra click to get into your content. Worse is when you don’t give a “skip intro” option or set of links into your main site content — because you’re essentially forcing your visitors to sit through the full animation. If you’re lucky, this will only annoy them… if not — they’ll just leave without giving your main web site a shot. And without an html link pointing into your site, the search engines have no way to continue either (unless you made use of a sitemap.xml file — but still…)

A good alternative to both issues is to make use of a flash header. There’s no problem to include a flash animation at the top of your main site, or as a feature within the content area, etc. Because this is an addition to your web site, as opposed to a full separate element.

Article Submitted by Giaza