The Don’ts of SEO

The Don’ts of SEO:

• Doorway pages: Never make use of doorway pages for getting higher rankings. This practice of using doorway pages is also known as “Cloaking”. Doorway pages are those pages, which have over optimized content, high keyword density, are submitted to search engines and linked to actual websites but are never seen by the visitors. If search engines identify such doorway pages being used by you, there’s always a chance of your site getting banned.

• Using Graphics: Don’t use too much graphic on your website. Search engines can’t read across graphics.

• Meta keywords: Don’t end up using irrelevant keywords within the Meta tag just to attract traffic. Search engines compare whether the keywords placed in this tag are actually being used within the content or not.

• Link Farms: While giving links make sure you don’t end up building a link farm. The popular search engines like Google now ban sites having link farms.

• Invisible Text: Avoid optimizing the site using invisible text with content in the same color as the background. Search engines may consider this as spam resulting in your site being penalized.

• Frames: Search engines can’t crawl through frames. So if at all you have to use, use them in a limited manner or make use of techniques that deal with frames.

• Flash: While building your website don’t make use of too much Flash or similar technology as the search engines can’t read the content written within them.

• Automated Software: Don’t make use of automated softwares to submit your site’s URLs to different search engines repeatedly. This may be considered Spam. Manual submissions are always a better and safe practice, as you can know about any problems during submission, if there are any.

• Duplication: Don’t submit web pages to search engines having similar content with different filenames. Search engines may detect such pages and ban such web pages.

Web Design affects search engine optimization and rankings

Web Design affects search engine optimization and rankings

• Directory editors, such as Yahoo! will review your site before accepting it.

• When search engine spiders become confused or slowed down because of design issues, your page becomes less relevant.

• Search engine spiders can't see what you and I see so they must rely on the specific algorithms set for them. Some of these algorithms are going to depend on design issues in your web site.

Analyze your competitor's web pages for search engine optimization

• Analyze HTML titles, Meta tags, ALT descriptions, headings, subheadings for keyword frequency and weight.

• Analyze link popularity.

HTML title tag

• HTML title should not be any longer than 70-100 characters, including spaces. Google – DMOZ

• Title should not begin with the domain name. It is often considered as spam.

• You should place the most prominent keyword first in the title tag.

• Each page title should describe the page content.

• Stop word such as “a”,“the”, “and”, “to” should be avoided.

Meta description tag

• Meta descriptions should not be any longer than 100 characters. Google

• Use a different Meta description tag for each page, as each page is different and stands a better chance of being found in the search results.

• Take your time to write a good description, consider adding your keyword phrase toward the middle of your description tag instead of the beginning. Yahoo!.

Meta keyword tag

• Meta keyword shouldn't be any longer than 268 characters (20 keywords). AltaVista

• It should not repeat the same keyword more than 3-7 times; you can get penalized for spam.

• Put important keywords first.

While Meta tags certainly are not the most important methods of search engine optimization, they do still provide useful information to the spiders.

Text keywords

• Do put keywords at the beginning and middle of your paragraph.

• You should write between 100-1000 words in page text. Same keywords should repeated 3-7 times.

Strategic keyword placements

Place keywords in the following areas will not cause for penalties.

• Domain name

• Custom 404 page

• Navigational scheme

• Anchor text

• Page name

• Text link

• ALT text

Link popularity

• Google, MSN, Hotbot, AltaVista Google and others use links to measure of a site.

• Google considers link farms and link exchange programs spam. These links are poor quality and temporary.

• Exchange links with a website that is relevant to your content. Don't exchange links with a website that has no PageRank.

SEO TIPS

SEO Tip : Use Headings

In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C's guidelines as well as commonly accepted "best practices" for organizing a web page.

Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page. Using cascading style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here's a piece of code you can pop into your heading:

Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.

SEO Tip : Use Title and ALT Attributes

More often then not, web addresses (URL's) do not contain the topic of the page. For example, the URL www.myspace.com says nothing about being a place to make friends. Where a site like www.placetomakefriends.com would tell Google right away that the site being pointed to is about making friends. So to be more specific about where we are pointing to in our links we add a title attribute and include our keywords.

Using the Title Attribute is an direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads Title and ALT attributes. The syntax is:

SEO Software

The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the Title Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here's how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:

SEO Tip : Nomenclatures

Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.

More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).