Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Some Typical Mistakes to Avoid in Effort to Improve Site Rating

By Irmin J. Roybal

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a bit tricky business and some webmasters especially at the beginning of their web career are trying to take a shortcut. Here are several typical errors, which can be made in attempt to improve site rating fast, but usually leading to just opposite results.

Graphic Header It is always nice to have a catchy graphic piece on top of the page picturing the logo and crowds of satisfied customers. Yes, humans tend to react positively to a vision of smiling faces, so nice graphic heading is always inviting. SE crawler may have a different vision, though. It looks for heading with h1 tag and keywords, or better for both at the very top of the page. If it will not find it there because of a space taken by the graphics, it may leave the site with a different (comparing to human visitor) idea about site quality. To avoid such nuisance, it is good to have h1-tagged title with the keywords before the graphics.

Invisible Text Stuffing your web site with keywords for robot satisfaction can be creative process or it can be dull, depends on the perception of webmaster. Some, especially beginners, are getting a bright idea of posting a ton of keywords embedded into a code (from simple text white on white to no script areas in the code, and so on). Cheating of this kind cannot pass with impunity, and it will cost the site its reputation.

Redundant usage of h1 tag The words posted under h1 (heading 1) tag are assigned higher rank. Usage of keyword phrases under h1 heading is a must. However, making more than one limited string under h1 tag, or tagging this way whole text is punishable. It is safer to use h2 and h3 tags for other headings, and keep h1 used just once.

Last Tip. SEO is an important way of getting web traffic, however, one should never count on this tactics as a sole source of visitors. After all, every web site is serving people, not web crawlers, and so, making your site dependable on SE algorithms which tend to change time to time is not wise, it can cost a lot of lost traffic. The best approach is to use a combination of all affordable and honest means of traffic generation, in all their variety.

Good luck!

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