Seo Mistakes | San Francisco Web Design
SEO Mistakes
March 16 2010
Search engine optimization is the key to organic traffic and there are thousands of tutorials on how to best accomplish this. Unfortunately, there are some really common mistakes that both new and experienced make that can actually hurt your rankings and prevent people from finding your site.
Building a flash based website is a visually impressive way to showcase to the world your product, idea or concept, but its never going to show up in search engines. Flash wont index, its all embedded, and at the most youll get the title to show up but its impossible to keyword anything or direct traffic to one specific part of your site. If you dont create an HTML version of the site, dont expect it to show up in search engines.
Ten years ago search engine bots needed proper Meta tags in order to index your site properly but heavy manipulation of these tags often resulted in sites that didnt relate to what the Meta tags were. Search engines bots, for the most part, completely ignore Meta tags, so focusing any time into them is a waste that wont help your sites search results.
Total lack of keywords, that is to say, not putting them on the page or in the site on a regular basis wont help your search engine results. It can often help to bold or italicize these specific keywords.
Spell check! Misspelled words and improper grammar drastically decreases the chances of someone landing on your page from a search because theres a good chance they spelled it correctly. Take the time to read and re-read all text on your site.
Pay attention to the title tag, its important and often the first thing a search engine sees when they spider your site. It should have your sites title, the page you are on and sometimes, where appropriate, a short description of the page or location if the site references a storefront or destination. Anything more or less comes off as spammy and tends to not index well.
Invest the time to make it work. SEO is not an overnight processes, its one that must be planted, watered and given lots of love and attention. You should start to optimize your site for SEO during the conception stage of building a site. Anything after that and youll be wasting time on what could have been accomplished earlier and will only defer traffic for weeks or even months.
Graphically drive pages are hard to spider, bots cant see what a photo is in the same way they cant read flash so you must optimize photos and graphics utilizing the proper title and alt tags for all photos and graphics. Not taking the time to add these important tags means your content wont be as searchable by bots and youll miss out on the opportunity to gain valuable traffic.
Source: www.thoughtmechanics.com