Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Attempt to Improve Rating

(My Original Blog Post: http://www.wealthyways4you.com/online-business/common-mistakes-to-avoid-in-attempt-to-improve-rating)
by Irmin J. Roybal


Doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to some degree flirting with robots, so certain caution must be exercised. Webmasters, especially beginners, may tend to forget about it, and make mistakes. Since such mistakes can lead to reduced or even ruined rating of the site, it is good not to make them in a first place or fix immediately upon reading of this text.

Graphic Header Placing page-wide image with a logo, company name, some related graphics and text within the image, at the head of the page is quite typical and rather slick way to design a site. It usually looks nicer to human eye than a typed text, but from SEO standpoint this is not the best idea. The top area of the page carries most valuable space for text heading (h1 tag) and the major key words and phrases. Graphic information is beyond reading ability of a robot, and it takes valuable space. Better approach: run your h1 text heading with keywords and initial text above the graphic header.

Hidden Text In the process of placing keywords in their site many beginners eventually are getting the same "bright" idea: to place a large number of keywords invisible to visitors (using background color for the text, stuffing large number of keywords in no script areas of the code, and so on). It looks like a cool thing, but in reality it is very uncool! SE can catch it and will punish the site. In general, it is worth to remember that search engines do not like spamdexing (cheating with SEO) and their robots are specifically trained for recognition of such tricks.

Excessive use of h1 tag All text under heading 1 (h1) tag is getting higher rating, so one may tend to use text under h1 excessively. Better approach is to use h1 tag only once, a repetitive use of h1 is punishable. For the rest of the headings h2 and h3 tags can be used repetitively, the limitations on usage of these tags are much less restrictive.

Final Tip. The advice given here is for SEO only. So, please, dont forget that your site is supposed to serve people (hopefully), not web spiders. Besides, SEO is one of the major, but still not the only way of making your site visible. It is not a good idea to base your traffic on SEO only: a change in SE algorithms can cost you a substantial part of traffic. It is much better and safer to combine all possible means for attracting visitors to your site.

Good luck!

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