Loading ...When exactly is the right time to start optimising a website for the search engines and why is making mistakes so costly for a business? The time to start your SEO is before you start designing your website. If a website is not designed on a solid foundation of SEO, you are going to have to backtrack. You will have to fix things and that’s wasteful in terms of money and time.
If the search engines cannot find your website, how will your targeted web traffic know of your existence? SEO practices are two-fold; first to light the way for the search engines and then for your web traffic to give them what they came looking for. So making mistakes in the most crucial parts of your optimisation means your website is in trouble from the word go.
Design and content
Avoid certain design mistakes completely as they will cost you ranking position. Frames and bulky graphics take too long to load. Avoid using frames and if you need to use large graphics, load graphics in thumbnail size and form. They then open in another page and at the same time give you an excellent reason to create an extra web page. Extra page gives you opportunity to use keywords in text, so it’s another good SEO opportunity.
Web users have no patience with bloated pages that load sluggishly; they will go to your competitors. Your content cannot be stressed enough; high quality, informative and well written with keywords and key phrases inserted to flow naturally. It is important to know your target market back to front. You must address your site visitors in language that appeals to their age group, cultural back ground and education level.
Don’t try to be devious
Don’t try to fool the search engines to try and get better ranking. Using cloaking techniques to create pages especially for the SEs is stupid because you will be found out. Stealing content from other websites is another very dim idea, yet people still do it. These types of behaviour by people who do not want to earn their ranking position rightfully cause problems for others.
Google has brought certain filters in to stop exactly this type of behaviour. For every unethical step, the SEs find a way to stop them. Never get lead astray by anyone offering you unethical optimisation efforts. It is simply not worth it to get your website penalised and in worse case scenario, getting your website banned.
Responsible SEO and link building
A top priority part of SEO is link building. You need as many high quality links as you can get, but here again quantity is not quality. Part of your ranking score is whether your back links are relevant. Broken links and links that are irrelevant is bad SEO and will not bring you the website visitors you want. Over optimisation harms your efforts.
There must be balance in the keyword distribution across each web page. If you try to cram in as many keywords as possible, your content becomes robotic and your web pages are no longer user friendly. SEs and web traffic demand quality and your business success depend on giving them that.
Related posts:
- Should speed be a ranking factor in search results?
- What are SEO design mistakes?
- Coping with a baffling drop in ranking
- There is more to SEO than ranking
- Ways to help you down the ranking spiral
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