Loading ...Search engine optimization is a discipline full of pitfalls for the unwary. Forget about search engine penalties: put a step wrong and you simply won’t even appear on the search engine results pages. Without a full understanding of what can go wrong, it can be difficult to get things right.
A lot of the bad moves made during optimization have an effect far beyond the search engines. It’s easy to forget that the ultimate audience for your site is your human users. These are far less tolerant of SEO mistakes than even the search engines.
Here are some of the most common mistakes made when sites undergo SEO:
1. Badly optimized titles. Everyone has come across titles that spell out a string of keywords in bold, capital letters. They’re not attractive, and they’re not effective, but site owners continue to use them. This comes from the mistaken interpretation of SEO rules, which set out that bolded text and capital letters will get more notice from the search engines.
Of course, text that is highlighted in some way will get more attention from the search engines but so will quality, well-written titles. Even if the search engines promote your badly written titles in their results pages, internet users are not likely to appreciate your efforts. It’s much better to spend time crafting nice-looking titles.
2. Keyword stuffing. It’s fairly well known that the search engines will penalize sites stuffed with keywords. What fewer people seem to think about is that internet users will penalize such sites in their own way as well. No-one likes reading clumsy internet content, particularly when they have a sneaking suspicion that they’re being subjected to badly-written marketing copy. Stuffing your site’s content with keywords gives exactly this impression.
3. Too many links. Word has long been out that internal links have some value for SEO. Unfortunately, some site owners have taken this to mean that they should cram every possible link onto their pages, repeating their navigation menu two or three times to a page.
A reasonable amount of links on your pages is fine, but don’t go overboard. Anything above 100 links to a page is likely to set off a spam filter with any wandering search engine spiders.
4. Over-optimised pages. Just as you can tell when a piece of text has been written by an advertising guru, an internet user can usually tell when a page has been optimised. Sticking rigidly to the rules of optimization can result in a site stacked full of homogenous pages, all with precisely 250 words of text and a keyword in the title. This over-careful approach isn’t going to impress the search engines or human users.
5. Boring sites. It sometimes happens that a site owner, caught up in the magic of search engine optimisation, forgets about the most important thing of all: creating an interesting site. It’s important not to lose sight of your original aims for setting up your website. Your site users will thank you for it.
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Tags: content, Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, spiders
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