Some Typical Mistakes to Avoid in Effort to Get Better Rating

By Irmin J. Roybal

In a process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), i.e. when humans are flirting with robots, some caution could be a plus. Young and restless webmasters tend to make site rating better than it really should be, and, as a result, the rating instead of increase cab get a sudden reduction. Several common errors of this type are discussed below.

Graphic Header It is always nice to have a catchy graphic piece on top of the page picturing the logo and crowds of satisfied customers. Yes, humans tend to react positively to a vision of smiling faces, so nice graphic heading is always inviting. SE crawler may have a different vision, though. It looks for heading with h1 tag and keywords, or better for both at the very top of the page. If it will not find it there because of a space taken by the graphics, it may leave the site with a different (comparing to human visitor) idea about site quality. To avoid such nuisance, it is good to have h1-tagged title with the keywords before the graphics.

Hidden Text In the process of placing keywords in their site many beginners eventually are getting the same "bright" idea: to place a large number of keywords invisible to visitors (using background color for the text, stuffing large number of keywords in no script areas of the code, and so on). It looks like a cool thing, but in reality it is very uncool! SE can catch it and will punish the site. In general, it is worth to remember that search engines do not like spamdexing (cheating with SEO) and their robots are specifically trained for recognition of such tricks.

Repeating h1 tag Text under h1 (heading 1) tag is getting higher priority in some search systems. For this reason some web masters may attempt to use h1 more than once. Bad idea, SE can punish for this too. It is better to use h1 just once, and use h2 and h3 repeatedly for the rest of all necessary headings.

Last Tip. SEO is an important way of getting web traffic, however, one should never count on this tactics as a sole source of visitors. After all, every web site is serving people, not web crawlers, and so, making your site dependable on SE algorithms which tend to change time to time is not wise, it can cost a lot of lost traffic. The best approach is to use a combination of all affordable and honest means of traffic generation, in all their variety.

Good luck!

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