Search Engine Optimization Guidelines

Search Engine Optimization is the key for any websites success. Doing business and maintaining it on internet has become very difficult due to lots of competition in every field. The website traffic of every site depends on how you optimize your website content and keywords? Every web page of your site needs to be fully optimized with high ranking keywords and quality content. Search Engine Optimization is a process of modifying web pages of your site in such a way that it will rank high in Search Engine Result Pages for the keywords mentioned in your web page content.

Besides, natural ways to gain top positions of search engine results, there are ways of topping the positions of result pages via unethical, misleading or manipulative techniques. Use of unethical way may lead your site to achieve the top positions, but I can guarantee you that your site will last only for a short-term. Every search engines need natural and unique results to occupy their top positions, not engineered results using unethical techniques. If the search engines discovered that your website has used unethical methods or cheated to arrive the top search engine position, soon your will get banned from search result pages.

Search engines want to ensure that the worthy and only the best sites should come in the top positions in the search engine result pages, or else the internet users will get unsatisfied with the results, and the search engine will lose its business and reputation. Hence, search engines will give time and resources to clear their incorrect results arrived at using unethical methods or deceptive behavior. So, even if you used these unethical methods to gain top position, it may benefit you short-term, but in long-term you will always lose.

SEO Guidelines to Do

• Build quality and unique content for users and not for the search engines. Even though you should keep search engine optimization in mind, always remember that users are the one who can make or break your site. As mentioned before search engines need results which appeal to users, so ensure that your content appeals to users not to search engines. Make sure you offer valuable content to your readers that will force them to visit back.
• Try to avoid unethical methods – if you think any of your techniques are unethical don’t use it.

SEO Guidelines to Don’t

• Do not use tricks intended to improve your search engine ranking.
• Make sure you avoid Link farms and schemes. These are all bad neighborhoods and are used often by spammers to cheat the result pages. If you are linked to by “bad” sites, this may negatively affect your ranking.
• Avoid using hidden text and links – this is a way of providing different content to users than that which is visible to search engines (cloaking). An example of this would be of including a large number of keywords related to your topic with certain HTML tags which hides the content to users; however the content will still be crawled by search engines. This would give the search engine the impression that your content is more useful than it actually is. This is seen as an unnatural ways of trying to achieve points with the search engines and you will probably get banned.
• Never use any of the automated programs for submissions of your website or send automatic queries to search engines.
• Do not have different pages / domains with essentially duplicate content.
• Don’t create such pages which install bad ware.

Posted under Search Engine Optimization, SEO Tips

Following are the 9 Biggest SEO Mistakes which Web Designers & Web Developers should avoid.

Splash Page

I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage. The worst case — the “enter” link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

Image and Flash Content

Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.

Overuse of Ajax

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because, ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (i.e. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

“Click Here” Link Anchor Text

You probably see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But, if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use, that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

Common Title Tag Mistakes

Same or similar title text:

Every page on your site should have a unique <title> tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because, every single blog post will have the same text “Site Name > Blog Archive >” at the beginning of the Title Tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.

Exceeding the 65 character limit:

Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

Keyword stuffing the title:

Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:

“Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures”

“Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.

Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms “abstract” and “dj”.

Unfriendly URLs

Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

Example of Friendly URL: domain.com/page-title

Example of Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=12356

These things are the pillars of Search Engine Optimization and so to your web site’s success path.

Posted under Search Engine Optimization