Friday, August 10, 2012

How to Avoid Making Common SEO Mistakes

In order to succeed in any online business and see real results, it's important to find ways to keep bringinig traffic to your sites. A great way to receive plenty of traffic is to learn what appeals to search engines so people can find your site more easily. Yet, even after learning this information, there are plenty of Internet marketers intent on fooling the search engines instead of appealing to them.

When this happens, Google and other major search engines tend to ban websites using less ethical tactics. Of course there are some webmasters who don't know that what they're doing is unethical. In these scenarios, the webmaster's lack of knowledge could be the cause of risking a website's success with such bad decisions.

In order to get your SEO tactics correct, it's important to know what you're doing wrong. This article will be discussing a few SEO mistakes that you should keep in mind and try to avoid.

Images do enhance the look of your site, but just like too many cooks spoil the food, having too many images is not good. In fact, you could reduce your search engine rankings by having too many graphics and not enough content, which is what the search engines are looking for. Plain text on your pages might look boring, but it has a far greater effect on your results than text showing on images.

Any text you have showing within images can't be read by the search engines, which means they can't use those words for SEO purposes. If you do decide to use some images, keep in mind that putting your site's keywords in the image's ALT tag can help you. This way search engines would be able to read this attribute in the image, which will ultimately help your ranking.

It is important to remember not to make the other mistake, which is to never plagiarize content from other sites, as that's not a good thing to do. If you copy content, you won't get far. While nobody may notice at first, people will soon recognize that you've stolen the content you're using.

And the biggest downside to it is that the search engines have gone smart and they know the difference between original content and the duplicate one. There's a filter that's saved for duplicated content and if your website gets trapped in there, it won't do a thing for your site's ranking. That's why you always want to ensure that you utilize text that is appealing to readers and search engines alike.

In order for your web pages to rank high you must start formatting your content in a certain way. You may have heard the saying "content is king," well, I don't know if it is true or not but having relevant and correctly formatted content on your site can make or break your SEO efforts. The content on your site plays a big role in your site's ranking. Your articles and posts should be no less than 300 words and have a keyword density of 3%-5%. The page title should match the keywords of the specific content. Be careful not to include a large amount of keywords in anything you publish.

Above all, make sure your don't use too much flash on your site if you do include images, and use ALT tags when necessary. Avoiding the above mistakes will most definitely help your rankings and keep you safe from getting banned.

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