Search engine optimization has become very essential now-a-days for keeping popularity of your site. However, it is very important to have that done in a proper way. Here are some common mistakes people make while doing SEO:
Keyword research
Many people have no idea that it’s even necessary. You can’t optimize for the product name only when no one has ever heard of that product. If no one has heard of it, how will they search for it? They won’t. The research needs to be done to determine what keyphrases people would type to find what your product is offering or related to.
Bad web design
Sometimes people hire a web design firm even before fully understanding what SEO is. The way most strictly online businesses begin is by someone deciding that they want to create a website online. Then they have one built. Then they learn about how to promote it and how search engines are used. The problem there is, if their site is not SEO friendly (meaning clean urls, not in frames, not 100% Flash and other search engine indexing problems), it will hurt their ability to rank well. Many people don’t find this out until after they have their site built. This can cost a new website owner a lot of money. Educated yourself. Do not rely on the web designer to tell you about SEO and what you need to know to have a SEO friendly site. Many web designers are just designers. They have no interest in what is SEO friendly or not. Do all your research before you have a site built and find a web design that can provide what you need for your site and the search engines.
Hidden text
This one still amazes me. That method hasn’t worked since Ebert sat next to Siskel. Why do people still try these old methods? They read old articles, blog entrys or messageboards. They think doing things unnaturally will help them in the natural listings. If you don’ know this yet, you do now. It doesn’t work.
Repeating words too often
This one gets overlooked a lot. Let’s say for example you sold tickets. Now let’s say your menu is all HTML (links). Your menu may read something like this; Hockey tickets, Boxing tickets, Wrestling tickets and so on. Now if you have fifty events and you have tickets after every one, you could run into a lot of problems. Especially if you wanted to come up on the search engines on any phrase with the words tickets in it. There are a lot of other factors that would need to be considered as well, such as the length of content on the page, off site SEO, etc. If this was a typical site, it would hurt your rankings in the SERP’s.
This is just a small portion of problems. Unless you are SEO savvy, it’s almost always better to hire a professional if you can afford to. Also, try to get your information and tips from reliable sources. It saves a lot of back tracking.
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