We at America Web Works Search Engine find ourselves amazed at the number of effort people spend trying to fool or manipulate their positioning in search engines. People seem to focus on the shortcuts to success and NOT on their Web site or the true value their content provides to their prospects.
In the spirit of educating marketers about best practices,we present this list of ten things you can do to sabotageyour search engine marketing project in a “New York” second.
1. Invisible (Ghost) Text – Search Engine
You have kept a good secret! Your visitors might not have noticed, but all search engine crawlers have been trained to be on the lookout for this obvious technique, last fashionable circa 1997. The search engines may very well purge all your pages from their index due to deceptive practices.
And, if you are feeling really frisky, you can make this technique even more effective if the invisible text has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the page it sits within.
2. Frames Usage
Search engines are not “frame-friendly”. Once they encounter a pesky frame, they either stop flat in their tracks because the frame doesn’t give them anywhere else to go, or they locate the pages beyond the frames and point people to that locale – which won’t have the frames included with it.
There’s truly no need to use frames and make an attempt to justify it by believing it will improve the prospect’s experience.
If your prospects can’t uncover your site or they find slices and slivers of you, how much then have you actually assisted them?
3. Search Engine Why Be Fresh And Original?
Why try to be unique, it’s just too hard anyway? It sounds foolish, but it occurs quite often. If you find something real interest on another site, just burning a copy and slapping your links on the top does not make you a unique force on the Net.
And how much actual shopping sites selling the exact same discounted products are enough for the average Web? In my book, the more sites you mirror, the least effective you will become.
4. Chubby Web Pages (Obesity Kills)
Sites with lots of graphics, animation, Flash, and music depose many disruptive elements with the search engines. Not only can it confuse your prospects, who are looking for obvious information and links, but the search engines may also not feel you are very relevant because they cannot be sure what to make of your Web site.
If you have a site made up of nothing but heavy graphics and multimedia, not only will you give the search engines zero to index, you may also aggravate any prospect running with slower connection speed. In nothing else, at the least, use alt-tags to explain images for text browsers, the hearing impaired, and search engines.
5. Redirects, Redirects, And More Redirects
You may be using “redirects” within your Web pages to trackclicks for advertising and also to pull together informationabout your site visitors. Your Web pages may be indexed,but you may not rank well at all. The search engines may notbe able to see the correlation that exist between your Webpages because the redirect code often blocks their path,unlike direct text linkage.
6. Lengthy URL’s
Dynamic (ever-changing) e-commerce and shopping Web sitesthat use parameters and their session ID’s often manifestthese difficult URL’s nicely.
If your Web site has lengthy URL’s sprinkled with questionmarks, percentage signs, Session ID’s, and at least threeparameters, you’re degrading your hopes for search enginesuperiority.
Lengthy URL’s do not look very attractive to individualssearching and the site URL’s contain calls to variousdatabases.
Leading the way for the search crawler directly into yourdatabase may quite possibly be a sure-fire way to send themspidering elsewhere.
7. Forgotten about your No Index Tag and Robots.txt?
Have you created a plan to keep all those nasty search botsout? Do you have a robots.txt file living on the root ofyour site? Does this file contain the following:
User-agent: *disallow /
Or does your Web property have a Meta-tag:
Be extra nice to your Webmaster. He or she may depart fromyour company in the future and leave this little monsterbehind for you to find at the end of a needlessly expensiveinvestigation into why the search engines will not make nicewith your Web site.
If you are using the special robots protocol, you will notwant to forget to remove them altogether if you are goinglive from a beta testing process.
8. Doorway Pages
Doorway pages (also know as jump pages and bridge pages) and anything that is created specifically for a search engine and does not contain more than valuable content or products your prospect, is not an effective search marketing tool.
If you’re not providing true content, the search engineswill discover this and may penalize your entire online site. If you’ve jammed yourself into this hole, you’ll probablyneed to return back to start with a new domain name.
9. Identical Meta-Tags And Titles
You worried over every single unique page of the Webproperty while developing it, but you didn’t spend a lot ofconcern that each page should be tagged (or classified) thatway.
Imagine walking into your public library where every singlebook had the exact same title. What better way to tell asearch bot to “take a hike” than showing them that all ofyour content is exactly the same. You will most likely seefewer of your Web pages indexed and much less traffic thanyou might otherwise.
Here’s a quick checklist to consider for your Meta-Tags andTitles:
- * Do they deliver a “call to action”?
- * Do they use relevant keywords and phrases?
- * Is your “Title” less than 80 characters?
- * Do they accurately describe what the page is about?
- * Are these consistent with the page?
- Free Meta-Tag Builder:
http://www.americawebworks.com/metatagplus/ - (Be sure to bookmark that link!)
10. Linking Networks
Did you find a service that’s offering to link thousands ofother Web sites to you today? Taking part in these programsmay effectively indicate to the search engines that youreally do not want their valuable traffic. The quality ofthese link pages as well as their overall content “value” toa human visitor is very low.
Most search engines do come together in agreement and canseverely penalize accordingly. Sites that get marked aslink spammers, may be briskly informed that they should finda new domain name and begin all over again.
I advise you to take these lessons in “eMarketing Sabotage”for what they are, guidelines to help you operate your goode-business practice free and clear of the many pitfalls andmistakes of other marketers and improve on your own level ofsuccess in conjunction with search engines strategies.
Soon, with a sound plan, a bit of smart work and a solidattention-to-detail approach, your Web pages may rankhighest among today’s top search engine results.
Happy Marketing!