What Are The Biggest Mistakes Most People Make With SEO? 1. The biggest mistake a lot of people make is making their site "pretty" using things like flash flash content, ajax and splash pages. Yes, these all do make your site very pretty, but search engine spiders cannot follow these! That means that the spiders cannot index your site, the search engines will not know about your page, and you will not receive rankings! Also, these cause the site to load more slowly, especially for dial-up users (and there is a surprising amount of people still using dial-up). So instead of receiving high search engine rankings, all you will receive is a high bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percent of people that click to go to your site but leave within a couple seconds. Not good at all. So, don't worry about making your site beautiful, make it functional! It can still look nice, but avoid all the flashy banners and such, the only thing they will help is your ego because you can say that you made a pretty site. One of the questions some of the top internet marketers ask people when they have low conversions is "is your site ugly enough?". Take that into consideration. 2. Using the same Title tags throughout the whole site. Many people use the same title tags for their entire site. Please do not do this. Search engines hate it, and people are not attracted by the same title everywhere. Doing this tells search engines that the pages are all the same, and they are not unique. Also, in order to attract visitors, do not just use your keyword, but make the title tag interesting. For instance, lets take a page on Whiplash Injury Claims for a minute. Which title tag is more interesting: 1. Whiplash Injury Claim or 2. All About Whiplash Injury Claim or 3. How to Make a Successful Whiplash Injury Claim. If you chose #3, you are right. And the search engines and visitors will agree with you. Use interesting title tags and different title tags on each page in order to keep high search engine rankings. 3. Using "Click Here" in the anchor text. When you submit articles and have links going back to your sight, you always must have it in the form . Most people put Click Here in the anchor text. What you need to put is your keyword, because when the search engine spiders read that anchor text they use the words in the anchor text to determine what your site is about. So if you want your site to rank highly for the keywords "Click Here", then go ahead and put those words in the anchor text. If not, then put the keyword that you are trying to get rankings for in the anchor text. Things to Remember When Search Engine Optimizing Your Site: Now, I have explained why search engine optimization is important and why you want to optimize your site for the search engines, but you want to remember that the visitors come before the search engines. If you have your site perfectly set up for the search engines but it is hard for people to navigate, then you will rank highly but people will never come back to your site and you will not convert any of that traffic into sales. Isn't the point of search engine optimization to get visitors so you can convert them into cash? If your site does not convert and people hate it, then it won't matter that it ranks #1 on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Always remember your target audience and you will be rewarded. Also, do not just stuff your whole page full of keywords to try to get your page to rank highly. It won't work and it will annoy everyone who visits your site. Make sure you are always natural and put a little bit of your personality in the site to make it unique. Search engines and your visitors will appreciate it greatly. Another thing you really need to remember is to fix broken links. You need to make sure that all your links are working properly so that the search engine spiders can follow them and index your site. Also, don't be afraid to use internal linking. Link to other pages of your site and help the search engine spiders find them and index them. Lastly, be patient. You will not be #1 on Google, Yahoo and MSN for terms like "weight loss" overnight. It can take time to achieve rankings, although if done properly they can be achieved within a couple weeks, generally longer for Google than for Yahoo and MSN.
Shawn Horwood
What Must You Do in Order to Search Engine Optimize Your Site? Well, let's start with on-site SEO. First of all, you need to do keyword research. This is VERY important. You need to know what keywords you are optimizing for so that you will receive large amounts of high quality, highly targeted traffic. You should spend a day doing keyword research. If you spend less than a couple of hours doing keyword research then you are planning to fail. So, spend the time, find the main keywords your market is searching and find the variations of those keywords. The next thing you need to do is find or create a template for your site. Do not use some free template that you find exactly as is. You need to alter the template so it is different from other peoples and there are not thousands of other people using duplicate templates. Then you need to optimize your site titles. The titles should be different on every page, as each page should be optimized for a different word. Search engines do not like to see lots of duplicate titles on the same website. Make sure that each title contains your keyword for that page. You should also optimize your META tags. You will hear many people tell you that this is the first thing you should do when search engine optimizing your site. Some search engines place value on the META tags and some do not, but you should optimize them for the search engines that do, because you will not be penalized by the search engines that don't. In the META tags you have the title, a description of the page, and the keywords. Once you have this done you need to create your content. Your content should contain and be related to your keywords. You may hear people discuss keyword density. They debate about whether it should be 2 or somewhere in between. Different search engines like different keyword densities. Too high of a density will get you penalized because the search engines consider it spamming, and too low causes the search engines to think that your page is not relevant. It has even been shown that the search engines prefer different keyword densities depending on the market. So really, it is incredibly difficult to determine what the keyword density should be. What you should do is just make sure that you are writing naturally, because you don't want your readers to find it unnatural or they will leave your site and not come back, and make sure that you include related keywords. This is something many people miss. They focus on just one keyword and that is all. But search engines also search for related keywords. For instance, if you have a webpage about dog training, you can include keywords such as: dog training, puppy training, dog obedience, puppy obedience, etc. If you include many relevant keywords, then the search engines assume that your site is more relevant. This is very important and can get you much higher rankings and you will sound much more natural. Also with this method you can sometimes rank high for your related keywords, even if you were not optimizing for them. Make sure that each webpage is optimized for a different keyword. Do not try to optimize all of the keywords on each page. By having each separate page optimized for different keywords it is easier to get rankings and as each page in your site climbs in the rankings so does the rest of your site. Now let's move on to off-site SEO. Off-site SEO is comprised of obtaining quality backlinks to your site. A backlink is a link from another website that links back to your site. In order to have good off-site search engine optimization, you need to obtain a large amount of quality backlinks over time. Now, you cannot just get any link back to your site. Well, you can, but it won't do you much good. You need quality links. Quality links are links that come from related websites and are contextual links. This means that if your site is based on dog training, then links from a site about using solar energy to power your house are not going to be worth anything. Furthermore, if those links are in a big list of links, then they are not worth nearly as much to the search engines as if they are surrounded by text. What you need is links from different authority sites in your niche. So if you have a site on dog training, you would need links from sites that are considered authority sites in your niche. Links from sites that aren't authority sites but are still related to your site will help your SEO, but not as much as if they are trusted authority sites. I mentioned above that you need to obtain your backlinks over time. If you go and buy a couple hundred backlinks to you site then the search engines will pick up on the fact that you suddenly gained a ton of backlinks and they will assume that you purchased them and you will be penalized and lose rankings for it. What you need to do is obtain only about 25 links a day. You need to continue to obtain more and more links in order to gain your rankings and keep them. So how do you get these backlinks? Well, you can beg and plead for them, pay for them, just wait for people to give you backlinks to your site (which will happen if you have a good site), or you can obtain them through free methods such as submitting articles. The article method is the method I prefer, as it is free, does not involve begging and pleading and appearing desparate, and it does not require you to wait for long periods of time before you can get rankings. What this involves is simply writing an article, spinning it into a few separate but very similar articles, and then submitting these articles to article directories. When you are writing an article you need to write about someting in your niche (obviously), and you should sound like an expert. Write the article as if you are an expert in that niche (even if you are not), or else people will not listen to you or read your article. Once you have written the article you need to spin it. Spinning an article is basically just changing the wording of an article so that it has the exact same meaning, but it does not have the same wording. This way you will not be penalized for duplicate content. Once you have spun the article into several different articles, you need to submit these articles to article directories. There are thousands of article directories on the internet that you could submit your articles to. Once you have submitted you article to the article directories, you need to submit your URL to website submission directories. Doing these two things will get your site indexed quickly and will get you quality backlinks to your site. Also, as a bonus you will receive traffic from the articles if people like what you are saying and you link back to your website. More free traffic! And if those people like your articles enough, they may even put them on their sites and then your articles go viral! This creates floods of traffic and even more backlinks, without you having to do much work!