Search Engine Ranking Mistakes

Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Mistakes

1.) Optimizing a website for the wrong keywords

The initial step in any search engine optimization campaign is to choose the right keywords for which to optimize your website. If you choose the wrong keywords, all the effort and time in trying to get a website to list in the first page will be lost. If the keywords you chose have no-one looking for them, or if the chosen keywords don't bring in interested targeted visitors to your website, then what benefit will you get from the top rankings.

2.) Putting an excessive number of keywords in the Meta Keywords list

Sites which have fifty keywords entered in the Meta Keywords tag (hidden at the top of the page), in the expectation that by listing all the possible different keywords in the Meta Keywords tag they will win a better ranking for those keywords, are wasting their time. It won't help. Contrary to popular opinion, the Meta Keywords tag have almost no remaining importance in regard to search engine ranking is concerned. Consequently, simply by listing keywords in the Meta Keywords tag, a website will not actually be able to win a better position.

3. Repeating the same keywords too many times

Another common error is to repeat target keywords in the main text pages and in Meta Keywords tag. Because so many have tried using this tactic historically and many still do, the search engines are logging this all the time. They can block a website which repeats keywords in this way, called keyword stuffing. Just repeating the keywords repeatedly will cease to be effective.

4. Adding many semi-duplicate doorway web pages

Another figment is that because the ranking formulas for each search engine is different, they must to create different types of pages for the many search engines. While this is great as an idea, it is counter-productive in practice. Anyone using this method, will quickly accumulate hundreds of extra pages, which soon become a problem to manage. Furthermore, although the pages are targeted for different search engines, they will all really wind up being pretty much the same. Search engines are often capable of detecting if a website has created common doorway pages, and may penalise or even ban the website from their listings as a result. Instead of creating different page for each search engine, create one page which is optimized exclusively for one keyword phrase for all the search engines together.

5. Using Hidden Text

Hidden text is special words listed in the same color as the background color of your web page, so it appears masked to visitors to the web page. For example, if the background color of the web page is white and if white text is added to that web page, it is masked and considered to be hidden script. Many web designerss, in order to get high rankings in the search engines, used to try to fill their pages with these extra masked keywords. However, there is a definite limit to the number of extra keywords anyone can repeat in a web page before it seems to sound distorted to human viewers.

So, to be able to hide it from the human visitors, but still maintain it keyword rich, many web designers added keywords with the same color as the background color.

This allows that what the search engines can see the keywords, the human visitors cannot. The search engines have long since discounted this technique, and penalise the web pages which have this kind of text. They may also penalise the entire website if even one of the pages in that website has this kind of hidden text.

The problem is that the search engines sometimes end up blocking sites which had not intended to use hidden text. For example there is a webpage with a white background and a table with a black background. Put some white text in that table. Although visible to human visitors, some search engines can decode this to be hidden text, ignoring that the background of the table is really black.

6. Creating WebPages With Only Video

Search engines only comprehend text - they don't comprehend pictures. If a website has a lot of graphics content and little text content, it is less probable to get a top ranking. To improve the rankings, the pictures need to be linked to keyword rich text so that the indexing robots will understand what is in the website.

7. Not using the NOFRAMES tag in the case if your website uses frames

Many search engines can't decode frames. For sites which rely on these frames, search engines only consider what is inside the NOFRAMES tag. Many web designers make the error of including something like this to the NOFRAMES tag: "This website contains frames, but browser does not support them". For those search engines which don't consider frames, this is all thecontent that they will index, which means the probability of a top listing is much smaller.

8. Using Page Cloaking

Page cloaking is a way used to deliver different webpages under different circumstances. People usually use page cloaking for two purposes: A) in order to hide the original source code of their optimized pages from their competitors and B) to prevent human visitors from seeing a webpage which looks great to the search engines but does not necessarily look great to humans. The issue is that when a website uses this cloaking way, it prevents the search engines from being able to log the same webpage that the humans are going to experience. And if search engines discover something else, they can not be sure to deliver relevant results. When a search engine detects that a website has page cloaking, it will probably ban the website from their index.

9. Using Automatic Submission Programs

In order to take a shortcut, many web masters use an automatic submission program or service to submit sites and webpages to search engines. Submitting your website manually to search engines chews up a lot of time and automatic submission softare reduce the time. But search engines don't want automatic submissions and may often ignore them. But this is altering as software becomes the name of the game.

10. Submitting too often

Sending out too many webpages at the same time to the search engines can hurt your site, and may trigger search engines algorithms to ignore most of the webpages which have been submitted. Submitting one page each day to the search engines works. Although some search engines will take more than one page each day from a particular domain, there are some which will only accept one page per day.

Rank Atlanta SEO Search Engine Ranking Mistakes To Avoid


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