Five (Plus Two) Things to Avoid in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)


Posted: March 8th, 2007 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: SEO PR Tactics | 1 Comment

Fabian Tan wrote on Promotion World today about five SEO no-nos when building your website that will get you in trouble with the search engines. The tips were solid. It shocks me how often you see these rules broken. Part of the problem is people overestimating the search engines (thinking they can read flash, etc.) and partly people underestimating them (assuming keyword spamming works). The tips are excerpted below. Note: I shortened the explanations slightly, so check out the full article if you want to read everything.

1. Never Keyword Spam: Don’t spam or hide your pages with the keywords you are attempting to target. Search engines are smarter nowadays and can smell your intentions from afar.

2. Don’t Use Frames: Websites which have frames are also unfriendly to search engines and will prevent from getting a good ranking. Try to avoid using frames whenever possible.

3. Don’t Use Flash Or Javascript: If possible, refrain from using Flash or Javascript elements. These dynamic scripts don’t contain much content in terms of words and the search engines generally do not like them. If in doubt, always put content ahead of fancy graphics or effects.

4. Don’t Submit Your Site Too Often: A few people I know, who after finding that their site was not indexed after one week, re-submitted their site to the search engines. If you do this too often, the search engines will think you are spamming.

5. Never Use Unrelated Keywords In Your Meta Tags: If you are selling sofa sets, don’t place the name of a popular person or product in your “Keywords” meta tag. Some webmasters use popular keywords in their metatags in an attempt to attract more traffic, but this does not work, as the search engines only look at their relevance to your web page.

I would add these two tips as well:

6. Don’t use so many images that you don’t have room for text: For indexing purposes, search engines ignore everything about images on websites except the “alt tags” attached to them. In fact, word is that search engines are even starting to give less importance to alt tags. A keyword and link rich site will beat out an image-based site every day, when all other things are equal. This isn’t to say you should shun pictures, as they make a site attractive for the visitor. However, ensure you have enough text to cover your keywords as well.

7. Don’t underestimate the power of promotion: There’s no point in building a site when you’re the only one who will visit … unless you’re doing it just to kill time. When you’re sure your site is done, submit it to the search engines and directories and, if you are running a business site, start building links to your site by paying the little bit of money it takes to post a release about it on a news distribution site like PRWeb.

Comments

Comments for this post

  1. seo says:
    June 18, 2007 at 1:08 pm

    I’ve ventured on your site on accident but find it very useful.

 
 

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