We all know that the proper search engine optimization can reap enormous rewards for our business. Anyone who has a website would agree that the free targeted traffic from search engines is just about the best type of traffic you can receive. However, many website owners do not know how to optimize their site correctly.
Here are some common mistakes that can put all your hard work to waste. Avoid the following SEO killers:
Cloaking Mechanisms: Cloaking is a sneaky technique that tempts many webmasters at one time or another. In plain English, cloaking for search engines is when automated software serves a well optimized page to the search engines and a different page to its users. It won’t even work unless it knows the exact IP address of the search engine’s spider. Stay away from this one because anyone who is caught will most likely be penalized by the search engines, or even banned completely. Save your money and search engine rankings by avoiding this technique like the plague.
Hiring A Bad SEO Team: Naturally, many business owners prefer to outsource their search engine optimization so they don’t have to bother with it. A business owner’s time is better spent growing his business than doing time-consuming SEO work. Hiring a SEO firm is the ideal solution, but you have to be really careful about who you choose to spend your hard earned money with. Never work with a company that promises a specific ranking, such as number 1 spot in Google or first page of Yahoo. Firms that make this claim are notorious for disappointing customers, and they almost never return your money. No one can guarantee specific rankings as no one knows the exact search engine algorithms. Another tip is to ask the company what they will be doing to boost your SE rankings so you know that “black hat” techniques aren’t involved.
Relying On Software To Keep Or Gain SEO Rankings: With all the software choices out there, it can be tempting to fall for something that claims it will increase your search engine rank with hardly any work on your part. This is almost never the case. An example is the much software available that submit your website to search engines on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. Although that may sound like a good idea, the search engines will only see you as a spammer and you will be disappointed by the results.
Paying For No-Good Services: You’ll find offers all over the internet where a company will offer to submit your website to thousands of search engines. This is impossible because there aren’t even that many search engines over the whole internet! Many times these companies submit your information to free for alls or links farms, which provide absolutely no benefit to you. Some speculate that this might even hurt your search engine rankings.
Keyword Spamming: Keyword research is an excellent idea and I love it! However, spammers love it too and some will optimize their site for irrelevant keywords in order to get better rankings. Some people also include too many keywords which make you look suspicious in the search engine’s eye. Make sure your content is relevant to the keyword you’re optimizing your page for or be prepared to suffer the consequences (lower rankings).
Using The Wrong Site Design: Although Flash looks nice, it can be responsible for a very dismal ranking in Google. The search engines can’t read it correctly so they’ll forget about you in a second. Stick to HTML or CSS and the search engines will be able to crawl your site much easier. HTML has been around for ages and you’ll notice that most of the top ranking pages are coded in this language.
So please, don’t make the mistakes I listed above. Your rankings will suffer, your website will suffer, and your bank account will suffer. Optimizing your site correctly while ensuring “white hat” promotion techniques will give you a much better chance of obtaining the search engine’s free targeted traffic