Once you’ve made up your mind to use search engine optimization, there are a lot of things you’ve got to do –
…or, if you’re among the lucky – things your internet marketing agency has to do.
When you’re creating your list of keywords, it’s important to think outside your site. If you wanted to find information on the topic you’re writing about, how would you search? Ask your friends and family the same question to get different perspectives, and then merge it all together into your strategy.
Either way, be sure to educate yourself about the process of Search Engine Optimization…
…and avoid making the kind of mistakes that will make you wish you lived back in the days of black and white TV.
A good way to help with search engine optimization is to switch from AP style to “SEO style” for all references in the body of your pages. The repetition of keywords and density play a role in where your page ends up on searches so veering away from the stringent rules of AP style will help increase views of your page.
While there are plenty of mistakes and errors to be made with anything you undertake, including SEO, there are some that require special mention.
Here are three of the worst SEO mistakes anyone can make – plus tips for avoiding them and getting the most for your advertising dollar.
Avoid guilt by association and check the pagerank of your outbound links on a regular basis. Just like a neighborhood can go bad, so can a website. Pagerank will tell you if the site is still considered good. If it’s changed get that link off your page asap.
Mistake #1: Failing To Hire A Reputable SEO Firm
Study the demographics of your intended audience, and find out where they search. If your intended readers tend to use one search engine over another, it may be best to focus on getting the attention of that search engine over others. Not only to you need to consider the search engines themselves, it is also greatly helpful if you are optimizing for the people looking for information in your niche.
When you look at SEO from a consumer’s standpoint, everything might seem to be pretty cut and dried.
You can blog, you can backlink.
Signing up your website to many search engines will help them begin to crawl your site for new content. You can do this by searching around the search engine’s page and finding a link to do this. Make sure you use a strong description and strong keywords because generally if they’re not relevant to what your site is about, they won’t categorize it nearly as efficiently.
You might even be able to build some code into your very own website.
The question is, do you know what you’re doing?
Avoid deep directory hierarchies to optimize your website’s search engine ranking. When a search engine has to trawl into deep sub-directories to find all of your content the indexing process slows to a crawl. Make sure that none of your website content is placed more than three sub-directories deep so search engines can index your whole site quickly.
Is it effective, or is it a waste of time?
Do you have time to do research on a regular basis, and make changes to your site as required?
The URLs used in your site affect search engine response significantly. If your paths use clear key words, the search engine will pick all of those words up- if URLs contain strings of random numbers and letters, the search engine will have more trouble parsing the page’s content and thus give your site a lower ranking.
Failing to hire a good SEO team is absolutely the worst mistake any business can make –
…and it’s the best way to waste your own time and energy that could be put to use in the daily improvement of other business aspects.
To make a specific page of a website more search engine friendly, include keywords in the page’s URL. If the URL contains numbers or symbols that people are unlikely to search for, the page will be less likely to get high search engine rankings. Including important keywords that are relevant to your site will significantly improve your page’s traffic.
Mistake #2: Failing To Take Your SEO Team’s Advice
Great! You’ve got people on your side, working diligently to get you a great Google page rank, and get your business noticed.
Unique content is great, but make sure it’s quality content as well. Search engines place spiders out there that are “trained” to know the difference and to find the best site for that specific keyword. In order to optimize your site, make sure that your site offers content that fits both sides of the board and will entertain and interest users that may come across it.
Now, if only you would listen to them!
Here’s the best advice any business owner can take, when it comes to SEO. Pay attention!
One of the best ways to get your site ranked high with the search engines is to place your keyword phrase in the domain name. With search engine optimization, your keyword being placed in the domain name greatly increases your ranking. It may even have enough impact to place you in the first page.
Your website is there to serve your customers.
Not to appeal to your own sense of what works.
URL extensions are like differently shaped light bulbs. They all light up a room. In other words, using .html, .htm, or .php will not change how a search engine views your website. You can use whichever extension you choose. There is no distinction, and it has no impact on your ratings.
If you’ve been in business for years and can remember old newspaper ad campaigns, read this again.
Your website needs to appeal to your customers, whether you like the way it looks or not.
Give each page its own title tag. This way, search engines won’t think every page is the same and fail to index it properly. Not to mention that it becomes easier for the reader to tell the differences between the pages as well. Something as simple as titling your individual pages can push up your ranking in the SERPs.
It needs to be easy to navigate, and you’re going to have to come up with new content on a regular basis.
Finally, believe your team when they tell you that what worked six months ago is not going to work now.
If you are optimizing a blog, your post title tag should be optimized separately from your blog title. It is important to try to use the major keywords you’ve selected for the topic of your blog in the post title tag as major Internet search engines will index those tags and put a high priority on them.
The internet changes by leaps and bounds.
Let your SEO team focus on what they do best, so you can focus on running other aspects of your company.
Mistake #3: Failing To Utilize SEO Principles
If you don’t use SEO techniques like blogging, article marketing, video marketing…
…and social media marketing because they seem like a waste of time to you, you are only shooting yourself in the foot.
You might have gotten to the place you are in today by controlling every aspect of your business…
…but the fact of the matter is this: unless you get on board with SEO, you’re making a major mistake.
Give it a try – and we promise, we won’t say “I told you so!”
