SEO Friends

Superstition: All you need to do to improve your page ranking is to place keywords in the meta tags for your page.

Fact: If only it was this easy, everyone would have a perfectly optimized website. There must be keywords in the copy on the page, not just in your meta tags. In fact, if keywords only appear there, search engines are likely to consider it spam and penalize your site.

Superstition: Hidden links or text containing keywords on a page can boost your search engine rankings.

Fact: While this was once both common practice and a good way to get your site noticed, it is now considered too be spamming and can get your website penalized, even banned from search engine results if you are caught doing this.

Superstition: The more reciprocal links you have with other sites, the better your own search engine ranking will be.

Fact: Having your website linked to the wrong pages; for instance, link farms and FFA pages can negatively affect your ranking. What you want is inbound links from quality websites. No one is exactly sure how Google determines PR with these links; one inbound link which is relevant to your site have much more value for your page ranking than do lots of irrelevant links to (or from) your site.

Superstition: Most sites are optimized. What chance do I have to succeed?

Fact: According to some studies 60% of all websites aren’t optimized correctly to rank high in the major search engines. Because of the very nature and volatility of search engine algorithms only a small percentage of web designers optimize the pages they build for their clients. When getting your website built make sure you discuss optimization with your web designer and find out exactly what services are included in your project.

Superstition: The more times you repeat the keyword in the page, the higher it will rank.

Fact: Search engines use their own standards to decide which pages will rank well. Keyword density is important and we all know this but what we don’t know is what the target keyword density is for SEO. Some say 3%, others 6%; no one knows with any certainty, other than that too many or too few keywords will get your page penalized in the rankings.

Superstition: Once your site in indexed by the search engines changes to it will have little effect.

Fact: The opposite is true. In fact, you must update your website as often as you can manage to do so. Even fixing a broken link can help you out here - search engines will stop sending spiders if they keep running into broken links on your site. Updating and changing you content will ensure regular visits form the search engines bots.

Superstition: You don’t need a robots.txt file or a sitemap.

Fact: Search engine bots look for the robots.txt file to let them know if they are allowed to index the domain and what they can crawl. When you use a site map, search bots will follow every link on it. This gets your website completely indexed. Both the sitemap and robots.txt file need to be in your root directory of your domain.

Superstition: Search engines cannot index pages with Flash and using Flash in your page will lower it’s ranking.

Fact: Search engines cannot index a Flash movie itself, but, if you specify Flash text (in the HTML) used in the movie, the text in the movie along with the rest of the page HTML will be indexed. Flash does nothing to keep the page from being properly indexed, nor does it keep your page from being crawled. Search engines don’t like pages that re-direct, including Flash pages that do it automatically. It’s the auto-redirect, not the Flash file that keeps a splash page from being ranked.

Related articles:

• Is Jon Leger’s 3WayLinks Real SEO Savior Or Just Another Scam?
• Basic Facts You Need To Know About Seo
• Search Engine Optimization for Total Beginners
• Parked Domain Traffic
• Top 5 Manual Surf Traffic Exchange Programs
• 7 Simple Steps To Writing For Better SEO
• Increase Targeted Web Site Traffic, It Can Be Done
• Keyword Research - SEO Management

Trackback URI | Comments RSS