Mistakes on Search Engine Optimisation

A lot of website owners and marketing people would like to believe that search engine optimisation (or what we most commonly call SEO) is a long and agonising process that needs a brilliant brain and expensive tools before you can venture on to it.  That’s totally false.

You don’t need to be a genius or have cool tools to fix problems on SEO.  All you need is a very strong reference aid and the capability to avoid the common mistakes that other people are doing:

1.  Targeting more than one keyword for a given page:

There are loads of people who commit this mistake everyday.  They do keyword research and once the targeted keywords have been identified, they load all of then on to their websites.  Such a bad practice – if you’d ask me.  What this would do is simply put your pages in competition with thousands more that are already there online.  Banging head to head with your competitors using all your chosen or preferred keywords all at once never leads to success.  Everyone tends to lose in the end.  The worst part is you still won’t get to rank for your keyword selection.  Ranking in the eyes of the search engines doesn’t mean seeing your website on first page.  It’s important that the search engine sees your page as an important contributor for that phrase that you’re targeting. Having said this, try and take a look at your page and visualise the best keyword that matches its description. Check to see how good your page is compared to your competition in terms of providing the right information for your chosen phrase.  Keep in mind that for one page you only need one keyword phrase.

2.  Make sure your Anchor Text has an Edge:

Anchor texts play an important role for the search engines to match your page to keywords that are important or relevant to you.  You need to make sure that the anchor texts you’re using are in sync with the keywords you’re targeting.

Here’s a tip for you: If you’re still among the “click here” users, you’re definitely on the wrong side of the boat. Try and find people ranking for “click here” and make the necessary adjustments using this technique following suit a practice of having consistency on the your keyword choices.

3.  Making a portrait out of your website:

Another common mistake that people do is embedding huge images on a page.  This  slows down page loading which in turn pushes visitors away.  Images can really make your site look good but over doing it is bad when it comes to optimisation.  You need to ask yourself then:  “Do they work as icing on the cake or are they an important factor to the message that I want to convey?” Images should complement and give emphasis to your content.  They shouldn’t serve as the content.  Nobody likes a slow loading website so try and avoid making that mistake yourself.  The faster your site responds, the faster it is that search engines can index it.

By keeping in mind these simple tips whenever you’re working on your page you can consider yourself able to provide SEO friendly information for your visitors and search engines.

Please leave a comment below.

Thanks.

Lorcan.