Having covered the vital significance of keyword selection, and before revealing in the next chapter a failsafe system for snaring the robotic spiders, let us now turn our attention to a series of deadly errors internet marketers consistently commit when getting their websites ready for search engine submission. Don’t fall into this trap when preparing your own mini- or maxi-site. Here’s a list of the 10 most common mistakes. By avoiding them you will also be avoiding a lot of anguish and frustration in the long run.
Optimising The Website For Inappropriate Keywords
The first step in any search engine optimisation campaign is to choose the keywords. We have already covered how to research and locate these, but we’ll deal now with other vital considerations in relation to search engine implementation. If you initially choose the wrong keywords, all the time and effort that you devote in trying to get your site a high ranking will go down the drain. If you choose keywords which no one searches for or if you choose keywords which won’t bring in targeted traffic to your site, what good will the top rankings do for your venture?
Overloading The Meta Tag With Keywords
I often see sites which have hundreds of keywords listed in the Meta
Keywords tag in the hope that by listing the keywords in the Meta Keywords tag they will be able to get a high ranking for those keywords. Nothing could be further from the truth. Contrary to popular opinion, the Meta Keywords tag has almost completely lost its importance as far as search engine positioning is concerned. Hence, just by listing keywords in the Meta Keywords tag, you will never be able to get a high ranking. To get a high ranking for those keywords, you need to position them in the actual body content of your site, following the format detailed in
Chapter 12.
Replicating The Same Keywords Over And Over Again
Another common mistake is endlessly to repeat target keywords in the body of pages and in the Meta Keywords tags. Because so many people have used this tactic in the past (and continue to use it), the search engines keep a sharp lookout, and may penalise a site which repeats keywords in this fashion. Sure, you do need to repeat the keywords a number of times. But, the way you place them in your pages must make grammatical sense. Simply repeating keywords endlessly is an exercise that no longer works. Furthermore, a particular keyword should ideally not be present more than three times in your Meta Keywords tag and your text.
Using The Hidden Text Technique
Hidden text is text with the same colour as the background colour of your page. For example, if the background colour of your page is white and you have added some white text to that page that is considered as hidden text.
This is how it works – or rather
does not work in practice.
Many webmasters, in order to get high rankings in the search engines, try to make their pages as keyword rich as possible. However, there is
a limit to the number of keywords you can repeat in a page without making it sound odd to your human visitors as they read the copy. Thus, in order to guarantee that visitors to a page don’t perceive the text to be peculiar (but at the same time maintaining keyword-rich content), some webmasters add text containing keywords in the same colour as the background colour. This ensures that while the search engines can see the keywords, the human visitors cannot. The search engines have long since caught up with this technique, and ignore or penalise the pages which contain such text. They may also penalise the
entire site if even one of the pages in that site contains such hidden text. Don’t use the hidden text technique; it’s not worth it...