If you are initiating Search Engine Optimization of your website, you probably have done some study about SEO techniques through forums and articles. You may have somewhat worked out a road-map of how to proceed with the site optimization process. While you may be clear on ‘what to do’, it would also help to understand ‘what not to do’. Very often, SEO professionals miss out these critical aspects of optimization rendering all their site optimization work ‘useless’. Here are the 10 most avoidable situations while you are carrying out SEO for your website.
Optimizing for the wrong keywords:
The biggest sin anyone can make in a SEO campaign is to choose the wrong keywords to optimize your site with. If your Site is ranking high for a keyword that is not being searched for then even a very high ranking cannot bring you any traffic. On the other hand, if you are ranking high with wrong keywords then you would get you traffic but will not convert into transactions.
Spamming:
Search Engines are getting smarter by the day. Over a period of time Search Engines have evolved from “Ignoring” spam to a point where they now ‘penalize‘ websites for using spam techniques. Following are the prominent Search engine spam techniques you should avoid.
Hidden text:
Hidden text is using the same color text on your page as the background color. In order to get a higher keyword density, webmasters sometimes add a lot of keywords as hidden text because they are not visible to the human viewer but can be read by the search engine crawlers in the source code of the page. Most search engines can now detect which pages use such techniques and ignore or ban such sites.
Doorway pages:
A doorway page is a web page designed for search engines so as to rank well for specific keyword phrases and redirect a user to a different page on visit. This is called “bait & switch” technique. These pages usually rely on frequent repetition of the keyword phrase, and try to “trick” search engines into ranking them well. Most search engines can now detect techniques such as “Meta Refresh” and penalize such sites. If you’ve used doorway pages on your website and it is still not penalized, you stand a good chance to come out clean by deleting these pages immediately.
Doorway domains / multiple domains with same content:
This technique uses URL-redirection meant to display another web address for the same web page or several domains show same content. In a typical example, the user types in a web address such as www.make-money-online.com but the URL is redirected to www.makemoney.com. Alternately, both these websites show identical content in the hope that one or the other may rank high in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Most of the time the same party registers these domains. Many people also use ‘disposable’ domain names in sending out email spam so as to protect their main domains. Search engines can easily detect these techniques.
Duplicate content:
Many site owners try to increase their content base by creating multiple pages of the same content either on the same site or copying the same site over several domains they may own. Search engines avoid cluttering their index with duplicate content and penalize sites, which do excessive content duplication in order to ‘trick’ their algorithms.
Cloaking:
Cloaking is a technique of serving keyword-stuffed spam pages to search engine spiders by detecting their IP address, while serving totally different pages to human visitors. This is different than geo-targeting where you may show different content to different visitors based on their region or language. The search engines can differentiate between the two and might penalize your site if you are attempting to ‘trick’ them. If you want to avoid any penalties, the thumb rule is to show the same content to search engines that you show to the visitors.
Keyword spam:
Keyword spam is a technique to stuff lots of keywords all over the page – in the Title tag, Meta tags, Anchor texts, Alt Attributes etc., in an attempt to increase keyword density or accommodate large number of keywords on the same page. This not only results in the page text to sound stupid to your readers, but you also lose the ‘theme’ of the page. Search engines rate pages as per ‘themes’ and credit pages, which have content, classified in nicely laid out ‘themes’. For best results, one should always focus on optimizing a page with 2-3 themed keywords rather than trying to optimize with lots of keywords. Over-optimized pages with keyword spam may invite search engine penalties.
Excessive HTML markup:
It is common knowledge that search engines give more credit to text marked as Headline “H1″ / “H2″ or other attributes like making the text bold, underlined, colored, italicized etc. In an attempt to improve importance of the text, many webmasters do an excessive HTML markup of their page content and hide the ugly display behind a craftily made CSS. Search engines have a fair idea of a balanced markup and penalize sites, which do excessive HTML markup in an attempt to ‘trick’ their algorithms.
Creating search engine roadblocks:
If you are developing a website, it helps to know of ways you can prevent creating search engine roadblocks. Your SEO efforts may not get results if your site structure is such that search engines find it difficult to index your site easily. Following are some of the problem areas which create a hurdle in your site indexing.
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