Ideaflea – Web Design and Development ToolsInteresting Information for Web Developers and Designers

There are a lot of ways to promote your website and, unfortunately, a lot of these methods are mistakes. Here is a list of some of the more common mistakes (often referred to as Black Hat SEO) that you should steer well clear of before beginning to optimize the sites for search engines.

1. Lack of Targeted Keywords and Phrases

A lack of targeted keywords and phrases can make or break your site. When a searcher goes to a search engine or directory and types in a keyword or keyword phrase that you would like to be found for – but you don’t have these particular keywords and phrases on your site – then that searcher will most likely not be able to find you.

2. Poorly Written Content

Site content is the absolute number one draw for both search engine spiders and search engine/directory users. If your content is badly written, is never updated, or is not relevant to what you want to be found for, than your site is neither search engine friendly or user-friendly. In addition, your content absolutely must have targeted keywords and phrases (see mistake number 1). Well-written content is what search engine spiders feed on, and content is the key to high rankings.

3. Bad Neighborhoods

These sites are also known as free for all (FFA) pages and link farms. They serve no other purpose other than to list tens of thousands of unrelated websites. Not only will these sites not provide your site with any traffic, certain search engines will ban sites who participate.

4. Over Optimization

Optimizing your web pages for a particular search engine can be a good thing. Over-optimizing can defeat the purpose, however. Search engines are catching on quickly to pages that appear ‘over-optimized’. Stuffing key phrases into your pages is the most common problem. Never use hidden (invisible) text to add keywords. You will get caught, and your site will get banned.

5. Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are orphaned web pages that are typically optimized for a particular keyphrase and a particular search engine. They are promoted to the search engine in an effort to achieve high rankings. They are not linked back to by any other page on the website and, as such, search engines are able to flush them out quite easily and penalize the entire site.

6. Using Meta Tags Improperly or Not At All

Meta tags include title tags, keyword tags, and description tags. While not the absolute most important component in Web site optimization (that spot is reserved for keywords and content), they do have an important part to play. Make sure to include all these tags in every page of your site, and target them for each individual page.

7. A Badly Designed Site

Ineffective site design includes lack of clear navigation, poorly designed frames, and large,load-intensive graphics. Search engine spiders can actually be blocked from crawling sites that are not well-designed, so it’s a major part of Web site optimization; plus, if users can’t find what they want on your site quickly, they’ll find another site.

8. Traffic Generation Scams

Services that purport to drive lots and lots of traffic to your website are typically not very useful. The traffic tends to come from seedy places like domain names that have lapsed in payment or commonly misspelled domain entries. Most of the traffic that hits these pages is accidental and is therefore of no value to you. Other traffic may come from other participants in the program who are required to visit other websites to gain credits’ for their own site. Again, this traffic is not targeted and therefore of no value. Some traffic may even be generated by automated software!

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