| Search Engine Positioning - Avoid These Traps | |
| Just like the old adage "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature", you should never attempt to trick a search engine. Sure, you may get away with it for a short period of time, but you will get caught. And the results, from an Internet Marketing perspective, can be serious. At a minimum, your page will be flagged for review by a human. If they don't feel like reviewing your page immediately, they may just quietly reduce the ranking of your page. In severe cases they may drop your page, and in some cases your entire web site, from their index. | |
| Below are some of the most common errors in judgment made by web site owners in their attempt to reach the top in the search engine listings. Some of these can occur innocently, some can't; all have the potential to bring your web site unwanted attention from search engines. | |
| Text the same color as your page background. When most search engines "see" this tactic they consider it as just another a form of SPAM and will flag your web page for review at a minimum. This is not the type of attention you want for your web site. | |
| Never attempt to stuff your pages full of keywords. Repeating the same keyword multiple times one after the other in the meta keyword tag is the most common error. Overuse of your keyword can actually cause your position to drop. There is not one magic number either; each search engine has its own limit. | |
| Never plagiarize. It is okay to review pages that rank well for the search terms you are targeting; this is a legitimate positioning strategy. Never copy the information and put it in your web site as your own and then submit it. If nothing else, this is contrary to the copyright laws of most nations. | |
| Never have "Under Construction" pages or active links to incomplete pages. When search engines find web sites that have incomplete pages they will ignore your site altogether. If there is no content why should they waste their time and effort to index the site? Not to mention what your potential client will think. Remember, your visitor is using the computer to SAVE time; not waste it at an incomplete web site. If for some reason you must have incomplete or "Under Construction" pages on your site NEVER have a link to it and ALWAYS exclude them in the robots.txt file. | |
| Never cloak your page. Cloaking takes one page and displays it to the search engine programs and delivers a totally different page to the real human visitor. This hides the page being indexed by the search engine from the human visitor. Again, this is not the type of attention you want for your web site. | |
| Avoid redirecting your visitors. There are many legitimate reasons for redirecting visitors, so most search engines do not penalize you for this, unless it is excessive. I equate the redirect meta tag to a "frames" web site - an amateur attempting to look like a pro; an amateur will use this tag to almost cloak their page. If you must redirect your visitors, do it gently and provide a succinct explanation. | |
| Now let's learn what every web site owner can do to increase their rankings within the relevant search results. | |
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