Pro-SEO

A lot of the time SEO articles focus on telling you what you should be doing to increase your position in SERPS and how to improve your sites SEO. This is all well and good, But how do you know if some things you are already doing are not having a nagative effect on your SEO efforts?

In this blog post i will go through some of the most common SEO mistakes so you can better understand where your efforts should be directed. Remember, SEO is partially about what you do, But it's also partially about what you don't do. One SEO mistake could mean all of your possitive SEO efforts are going to waste. You have to put bad SEO habbits to rest before concentrating on good SEO habbits.

Lack Of Titles

A title is one of the most important on page SEO factors on any search engine. Whether you are talking about Yahoo, Google or icerocket, Your titles need to be different for every page and they need to be descriptive of that pages content. The title is the first thing search engines, And users, look at when deciding if that page is relevent for the term searched for.

Non-descriptive Hyperlinks

Your hyperlinks need to be descriptive of the page it is linking to. This goes for your internal linking and for backlinks from other sites. Too often i see people putting "click here" as the anchor text of hyperlinks.

If you have a page about dog grooming don't put "click here for info on dog grooming".
Use the phrase "follow this link for information on dog grooming".

Use of images and SEO

Never use images where you don't have to. Especially if those images contain text or are a hyperlink. Remember, Search engines can't see images so by using images instead of text you are reducing the amount of phrases search engines can see and are also missing out on having descriptive hyperlinks pointing to your content.

Judging your sites SEO success based on PR

Many, many times i have seen people worrying about page rank. They think that because they have PR 2 Google must hate them or have some personal vendetta against them. When judging your sites sucess look at only two factors. Visitor stats and conversions. If month after month you are getting more visitors and selling more products what difference does it make what pagerank Google has given you? SERPS are not ranked in order of PR and the fact is PR (real PR) is only a small factor of over 200 factors that google uses when ranking sites in the Google index, And toolbar PR is 100% meaningless.

Blackhat SEO

Under no cicumstances should you ever do anything considered to be blackhat SEO. There are many tactics that could be labeled "blackhat", like doorway pages, cloaking, keywork stuffing and spamming. But you shouldn't need a list to know if what you are doing is unethical, You do have a conscience don't you? Just think to yourself "would i be prepared to tell Google what i am doing?". If the answer is "no" then you probably shouldn't be doing it.

For more inofrmation on what google think is acceptable you should review their Webmaster Guidlines

Submitting to search engines

While there is no evidence to suggest submitting your site to seach engines has a negative effect, it certainly doesn't have a possitive effect. Search engines should be able to find you on thier own. So repeatedly submitting your site to search engines, Or even submitting once, is a mistake. And paying someone to do it for you is certainly an SEO mistake.

Using flash and javascript

Usually there is no problem with using flash and javascript. But remember, Search engines can't see it. Google bot doesn't have flash installed (and even if it did it doesn't have eyes to see it) and it doesn't use a browser so javascript goes unexecuted. By all means, use flash and javascript where you have to (or want to), But remember that the google bot can not see it. So if you have a site entirely made using flash you might as well not even bother trying to SEO it.

Labels: seo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 05, 2006 at 12/05/2006. You can skip to the end and leave a response.