Thursday, January 15, 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.

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.

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.

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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