5 Search Engine Mistakes

5 Search Engine Mistakes Not to Make

There are many more than 5 but here are the top 5 mistakes as we see them.

1. Not having proper content.
   Content is KING. Many people just fill a page with keywords or keyword phrases falsely thinking this is going to help their rankings. Search engines have come along way baby from the old days, which was just a few years ago. Now they see pages filled with keywords and keyword phrases as an attempt to spam their search engine, which they do not take kindly too. You should build the content for the people viewing it. Search engines read your page exactly the way a person would. Use up to two not more of the same keywords or phrases that people will use to find your website but make sure it makes sense to your website. The idea of making a page short an sweet doesn't cut it either. The more good meaningful text the better. You need to have at least 200 words for each page. And remember each page matters to all of the major search engines.

2. Using Flash or Frames to build your website.
   Yes, it looks good. But no, search engines can't all read them. It's complicated enough for a search engine to spyder a website in HTML let alone read Flash and work through frames. Now, it's not a problem using small amounts of Flash in a website but not for the body text or the navigation bars.

3. Text in graphics.
   Many designers and novice use text graphics or navigation buttons so they can use that special font that is oh! so cool. But search engines don't have eyes and they can't tell what the graphic says. Your best off using plain text or at least use the <alt> tag for your graphics description.

4. Proper navigation and page names
   Since most search engines follow the navigation links from the index page it's important to have it structured to easily search your website. Most website use what's called a tree set up. Everything starts at an index page, the trunk, then branches out to a primary subject, then each primary subject branches to secondary subjects and so on. It's important to have a link to each primary subject through out the website this gives the search engine easy access without having to return to the index (home) page. Google along with others include the page name as part of the search. So to add to your ranking it's important to name each page for a keyword or keyword phrase. Don't leave it Home or Page2.

5. Improper links
   Asking people to link to your website just to get links is fruitless. Search engines have learned that this is how websites cheat to get a better ranking and they've taken steps to correct this. They look for links that are relevant to the website. They look for one way links (those that do not link back to the website the link came from). They look for links from what's known as link farms which in their eyes is a no no.

 To find out more about this go to our getting a top ranking in Google page.

If you can refrain from making these 5 critical mistakes, you can avoid being invisible on the web. And while you may still need search engine optimization to obtain top rankings in the top three pages of searches on your important keywords, you first need to make sure you're not condemned to page 777 by these five critical errors.