No traffic, no money. You already know that. You also know that be listed in the top search engine results will drive to your site tons of visitors. Maybe what you don’ t know is what to do in order to rank well, right? Search engine ranking optimization is basically tweaking your website in some strategic points to make search engines love it.
There is no magic secret or tool that will automatically make your site rank in position one. (Sorry!) Search engine ranking optimization is a complex task, where a lot of changing factors should be taken into account. However, there are some basic (and more advanced) practices that can help you build search engine friendly sites.
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I ‘m not going to outline here a search engine ranking optimization guide but to tell you the 10 big mistakes you should avoid.
- Targeting the wrong keywords. Choosing the right keywords is crucial. Even if you do the best search engine ranking optimization job, it will be useless if you do it for the wrong keywords.Avoid using keywords with a lot of strong competitors or with not enough searches to generate the traffic you need. Be realistic. Some websites are very difficult (if not impossible) to beat, especially those with the highest page rank and a lot of backlinks.
- Optimizing each page for too many keywords. Optimize each page of your site for one or two different keywords. No more than that. If you try to optimize for too many keywords, you will end up with a page that is not well optimized for any of them.
- Ignoring the title or wrong optimization of it. Always use the title tag and do it right. Avoid keyword stuffed titles with no semantic meaning. This is good not only for search engine ranking optimization but also to persuade people to click and actually visit your site.
- Poor navigation system. Your internal links are the road map that robots use to crawl your site. It is through the internal links in your page that robots find, crawl, and index the different pages on your site. Avoid using flash and java script. They look very nice but do not help search engine ranking optimization. Robots cannot read flash and java script. Thus, they will not see (and follow) the links. If you insist on using them, at least don’ t forget to provide a site map.
- Using images in titles and headers. Doing so you are wasting a great opportunity to improve your search engine ranking optimization. Instead use H1, H2 tags and place keywords in them. This will help search engines to establish content hierarchy and understand the words in the headers as relevant content.
- Flash websites. As we have said, robots cannot read flash, so they can’ t index a Flash site. If you, for whatever reason, must use Flash, provide an optimized HTML version to allow your site to be indexed.
- Lack of keywords or keyword stuffing. Some people write the content of the site without using keywords; others, overusing them. Neither is good.
- “Click here” or similar anchor text on links. Instead of using these generic phrases as the clickable part of the links on your page, use descriptive, keyword rich text.
- No canonical redirect. You have two different URLs for your domain- one with www and another without it- You should choose one of the two URLs as your preferred (or main) one and then redirect from the non-www version of the URL to the www version (or vice versa). Many people forget to do this. No redirecting means that links to one of the two URLs will just benefit that URL, not the other one. By redirecting, the links to any of the two URLs will be counted together, as links pointing to the URL you have set as preferred, this will benefit the rank of your site.
- Forgetting about off-site SEO. Optimizing your title, images, and other on-site elements is not enough. For effective search engine ranking optimization you also need to work on what is called off-site SEO. It refers to techniques that are not performed in your own site. The most important one is getting quality relevant backlinks. This is sometimes neglected or even ignored.
