I have had lots of emails this past month, thank you so much for those. I am always happy to help and offer any advice that will help you. If i can thank you for following me by giving you some advice then please get in touch.
The bulk of the emails this week has been about sluggish results in the search engines. Below are a few of the basic things that will effect your ranking. The reason why i have stuck to the basics is because most of my readers are new to search engine marketing. For those of you who are more advanced please drop me a note and i would be happy to get all techie with you.
When your website has high search engine ranking, you will see many benefits. Although seo can be a little hard to get the hang of, there are simple mistakes you should avoid.
1. Using the wrong keywords
The first thing you should do is keyword research. If you get this wrong your off to a non starter. Make sure you target the best keywords for your niche, ones that searchers actually are using.
2. Forgetting to use title tags
Many beginners often forget to use title tags. They are important and tell search engines and visitors what your pages are about. Make sure you use different title tags for each page.
3. Over doing flash
Flash cannot be read by googles bots. If you are going to use flash, it is essential that you also use the html mark-up for it.
4. Back link spamming
This is something even the best webmasters are failing to grasp. Link farms are not a good thing with Google. You will get much further by getting high quality one way links from website with high pr.
5. Keyword stuffing
The content you write on your website must make sense. Do not stuff your content full of keywords that have no relevance to your sentences. This will get you penalized by Google quickly.
6. Keyword density must stay below 5%
7. Duplicate content. Google loves fresh, unique content. Google bots are very clever at spotting content that is used elsewhere.
8. Poor website navigation
Your website must have clean navigation and no broken links. It is essential that both visitors and search engine bots can access all your pages. Here is a great recommendation for clean low cost website design.
9. Using images for headers
Headers are the first thing Google bots see. Take advantage of this and use your keywords in the h1 and h2 headers.
10. Using unreliable hosting. Cheap may be good for your bank but having servers going down and pages not loading will lose you visitors and stop Google being able to properly access your site and give it high ranking.
