What Not To Do When Writing Your Website
Advice from Florida Copywriters, Web
Designers and
Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs)
by Susan
Greene
As an Orlando freelance copywriter, I've met with many Florida
web designers, search engine optimizers (seos) and fellow copywriters.
While we all have our own opinions on the optimum way to develop
a web site, one thing on which we all agree is that good, informative
content is imperative to success on the Internet.
Yet we've all also encountered
those people who think they've found a way around the hard
work involved in creating good content by using "tricks" to
obtain good rankings on search engines. While these gimmicks
may work for a while, eventually the search engines catch on
and either penalize or completely banish those web sites from
their indexes. Ouch!
What methods should you avoid to ensure your site is never black
listed by search engines?
1. Keyword stuffing -"Stuffing keywords into places where keywords don't belong, such as in comment tags or image ALT tags where the keywords have nothing to do with the specific image. Keywords should be placed throughout the content of your site, strategically sprinkled so that they catch the attention of search engines AND more importantly, give the reader good quality information.
2. Invisible text -Text color the same as background color. Your website's content should be visible to viewers as well as search engines. Hiding text so that only search engines see it and index it is essentially attempting to fool the search engines.and they don't like to be fooled.
3. Automated submissions -Using automated tools to frequently deliver huge numbers of pages to the submission pages of search engines. In most cases, you need only submit the home page of your URL, and once is enough. Resubmission can sometimes cause your pages to be dropped if they are already listed in the search engine's database.
4. Submissions to "thousands" of search engines -This is a waste of time, since the major search engines and directories drive the majority of the traffic to web sites. Also, many smaller search engines get their results from the big ones.
5. FFA (free for all) links -Link popularity can help your ranking on major search engines, in particular Google. However, the links must be relevant to your site's content. A link from a page of random links is useless. And a link from a "link farm" can even count against you.
6. Cloaking -Also known as stealth, this is a technique used by some web sites to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing while serving a different page to actual visitors to the site. This is a method commonly used by pornography sites.
7. Doorway pages -This is a page written specifically to rank well in search engines for particular keywords, serving as an entry point through which visitors pass to the main content which may or may not be relevant to those keywords.
Focus on creating content that your website visitors will find interesting and useful. The search engines will reward you with good ranking and more importantly, you'll find that your visitors are more likely to become customers. And isn't that the whole reason you have a website?
