20 Things to not do when trying to improve search engine results
- Frames are a great way to display my web pages.
WRONG
If your site uses frames then to improve its search engine ranking these need to be removed. Absolutely terrible for your visitors accessibility and search engine placement. Frames pull separate pages into one main frameset. There is no need to use them anymore they are outdated. One of the worst things is pages can be indexed by search engines that are a part of the frameset rather than the whole website. So they may land on a page that is just the menu section and nothing else. It leaves people confused and makes you look amateurish. There is absolutely no need for frames not to be confused with Iframes but these should only be used for particular things also. A site should not be designed around Iframes either.
- Saturating my site with my keywords as much as possible is a good thing
WRONG
Overstuffing your meta tags , title,description and content looks terrible for your visitor and you might get hits but no sales. Also take it too far and you will see your site fall not climb the search engine ladder. It is a fine balance. Get some great wording with a keyword saturation of between 4-9% for your keywords. Also make sure that the key words are in close proximity so if you sell red T-shirts group those words together its no good having the word red and T-shirt separate all over your site.
- Any links to my site is good for search engine ranking.
WRONG
You might just find that the company you paid £50 for linking you to 1000 sites has linked you through link farms or perhaps on other websites that might get you blacklisted. If a website has been blacklisted and you are on that website as a link you will see your search engine ranking go down not up. Be careful who you link to and who links to you. Also get good quality links to your site, don't always do reciprocal link sharing this isn't the best way to get better results.
- An SEO company called me and said they can get me 1st place in a week on google.
Quite often you will be approached by companies that offer a quick £250 fix to get your site ranking 1st or in the top 3. Good SEO takes time and research. Things don't happen just like that. It can take months to see results. An SEO company might try to hoodwink you into getting 1st place on a search term that doesn't really get you sales. Many people are fixated with their google rank positions. And many companies will manipulate this desire to be 1st. There might be a less competitive keyword that you can be first rather than the one you have strived to get. Also why not put some of that money you were going to spend into Google Adwords a pay per click advert. This gets results and sales. Get rid of that old advert you have had running for years on end in a publication and put the money towards PPClick adverts. There are good companies out there. Find some sites they have done. Ring the clients and see what they say.
- A company offered to submit or re-submit my site to 1000 search engines for only £150
Search engine submission can be done by you for free 90% of the time and to be honest most of the search engines aren't even relevant they quite often utilize the three big ones. The best thing you can do is make sure the web designer you use submits to the main ones Yahoo, MSN (Live), Google, DMOZ and ASK
Re-submission
There is no need for re-submission to search engines they will visit your site from time to time updating content as they go.
- Don't stuff keywords in your page that is the same colour as the background.
Called hidden text if found you will certainly get blacklisted.
- Don't spam your link all over blog comments, guestbooks, etc.
It is spamming, not SEO it does no good at all. Instead of spending time doing that spend your time writing an informative article. The internet is about information and the more google see's your site that way the better for you.
- Don't hire an SEO company and then not be involved.
It takes an understanding of your market and maybe some hard work if you want those sales and potential customers it is time to get involved. Talk to them ask questions and what you can do also.
- Don't have a site completely built in flash media or have complex navigation or content generated by javascript.
When it comes to getting your site crawled by search engine spiders having a site built in Flash media is a big mistake. Spiders cannot read the text ( there is a way for this to be done but is highly complex and expensive. If you want flash animation as part of your site ( I mean it does look so good ) then make sure it isn't the navigation menu or anything that might take away from content that needs to be spidered. Use it in a way the catches the eye. Also make sure that the lovely collapsible menu system you have for your site navigation is not built using complex java script / ajax. Dropdown style and tree style navigation can be done with CSS and some javascript to run the animated functions a much much better way to do things.
- Don't allow both www.yourdomain.com and domain.com to resolve to your home page.
Being able to reach your website with these two separate addresses's means a search engine sees this as two websites with identical content. This is seen as mirroring and will only do your websites harm. Also don't link to your home page with a URL like www.yourdomain.co.uk/index.html—that's also a separate address from www.yourdomain.co.uk and will look like duplicate content to a search engine.
- Don't pay for a website to be designed without the company having a decent SEO knowledge.
They may not be able to promise 1st place ( not a problem ) but you will not want to be faced 2 years down the road wondering why your site is not getting sales only to find it was built badly.
- Don't buy lots and lots of domain names and build websites with similar content just for search engine placement.
False economy you might as well pay for adverts. If you do have micro sites do not have them all with the same hosting company also as search engines will know that your 5 websites are all on the same server and at roughly the same IP address. You can go with the same company but make sure it isn't on a shared hosting.
- Don't obsess over google.
There are other search engines that you might be able to get top positions on. Yes google gets most of the traffic but others still get a good percentage also. Ask yourself is business good? Then don't spend all your time trying to get to number one on google, it can use up valuable time where you may be better spent doing something else to get business leads.
- Don't sit back and do nothing.
Even if you have pretty good search results do not forget your customers. Give them a reason to come back be it offers , updates, news , articles etc.
- Don't use the same anchor text to link to your site.
This gets seen as unnatural link building. Your link building should look natural, and varied anchor text will help. ( See top 10 tips )
- Don't check your search results every day.
There are better ways to spend your time.
- Do not delete web pages.
Do not delete old pages archive them instead in some way. Search engines will read this as a 404 not found not good for your search results. If you need to completely get rid of pages then using what is called a 301 redirect is the best practice. To read about 301's look it up on google.
- Don't just get a domain name stuffed with your keywords.
It just looks silly and you need people to be able to remember it easily, but it is important to have keywords in your domain name. It really can help. So if you sell televisions and are a new business rather than calling it after your business name why not choose a domain name cheap televisions.co.uk for example. This definitely helps with your results when people search for cheap televisions as the keywords are in the domain name.
- Avoid hyphenated domain names.
Actually as long as it reads ok and you don't need to be telling people over the phone every day then it isn't a problem. Don't have more than one hyphen in it though it would get very irritating trying to tell someone what your domain name is on the phone.
Ok its www.cheaphyphentelevisionshyphensussex.co.uk eeeekkkkk
- DO NOT ever reply to SEO email spam.
A reputable company never contacts you in this way. And by replying you are adding to the reason people send spam emails. Spam would not exist if it did not get results.