Creating Pages With An Over-Abundance Of Graphics And Marginal Text

The search engines only understand text – they don’t understand graphics. Hence, if your site contains lots of graphics but little text, it is unlikely to get a high ranking in the search engines. To improve your rankings, you need to replace the graphics by keyword-rich text for the search engine spiders to feed on.

Incorporating Keyword-Rich Text In The ‘no Frames’ tag

Many search engines don’t understand ‘frames’. For sites which have used frames, these search engines only consider what is present in the NOFRAMES tag. Yet, many webmasters make the mistake of adding something like this to the NOFRAMES tag: ‘This site uses frames but your browser doesn’t support them’. For the search engines which don’t understand frames, this is all the text that they ever get to see in this site, which means that the chances of this site getting a good ranking in these search engines are non-existent. Hence, if your site uses frames, you need to add a lot of keyword rich text to the NOFRAMES tag.

Using Page Cloaking

Page cloaking is a technique used to deliver different web pages under different circumstances. People generally use page cloaking for two reasons:

The problem with this is that when sites use the cloaking technique it prevents the search engines from being able to spider the same page that their users are going to see. And if the search engines can’t do this they can no longer be confident of providing relevant results to their users. Thus, if a search engine discovers that a site has used cloaking it will probably ban the site forever from their index. Hence, my advice is that you should not even think about using cloaking in your site.

Over-Reliance On Automatic Submission Tools

In order to save time many people use run-of-the-mill automatic submission software or a service to submit their sites to the major search engines. It is true that submitting your site manually to the search engines takes a lot of time and that an automatic submission tool can help you save a lot of time. However, the search engines don’t like these tools and may ignore your pages if you use them. In my opinion the major search engines are simply too important for you not to spend the time to submit your site manually – that is if you decide not to do what I’m suggesting next...

There is a legitimate way to avoid this tiresome process. When you host your website with either Third Sphere or Site Build It! they do it all for you at no extra cost. What’s more to the point, the automatic software they use is state-of-the-art and perfectly acceptable to the major search engines.

Over-Submitting Pages On A Daily Basis

People often make the mistake of submitting too many pages per day to the search engines. This often results in the search engines simply ignoring many of the pages which have been submitted from that site. Ideally, you should submit no more than one page per day to the search engines. While many search engines accept more than one page per day from a particular domain there are some majors which do not. Hence, by limiting yourself to a maximum of one page per day you ensure that you stay within the limits of all the search engines.

Over-Concentration On Search Engine Submission

Here’s the final common mistake that people make when it comes to search engine optimisation – they spend too much time over it when they opt to do it manually. Sure, search engine placement is the most cost effective way of driving traffic to your site and you do need to spend some time every day learning how the search engines work in optimising your site. However, you must remember that search engine optimisation is a means to an end for you – it’s not the end in itself.

The end is to increase the sales of your products and services. Hence, apart from trying to improve your site’s position in the search engines, you also need to spend time on all the other factors which determine the success or the failure of your website – the quality of the products and services that you are selling, the quality of your customer service, and so on. You may have excellent rankings in the search engines but if the quality of your produce is poor, or if your customer service leaves a lot to be desired, those high rankings aren’t going to do much good.