You can find anything you are looking for on the internet; information, products, services and entertainment. You also find a lot of misinformation and bad advice. When it comes to the optimisation of your website, knowing the difference between good advice and pure myth could be the difference between success and failure. Beginners are exceptionally prone to falling prey to bad advice if they do not get cold, hard facts from the start.

Optimisation starts in the design phase

Far too many people think that you can easily optimise a website once it has been designed and launched. This is a very bad and costly mistake to make. You have a great website with zero visibility if you do this. You have to incorporate SEO during the website construction, right from the foundation upwards.

Your optimisation efforts start with the Meta tags and continue through each phase as your website is being designed. Once the designing has been done it becomes a horrendous task to try and optimise that website. It is not only difficult, but can be very costly in terms of money and lost customers while the battle is on to fix up the mess.

Common mistakes

Often people do not understand that a website cannot be designed to please you. Everything in a website must be done to attract potential customers and the search engine spiders. Elaborate graphics might look stunning, but the search engine spiders do not even see them. If you do not have content that is solid, informative and optimised, the spiders find your website of no value and will swiftly move on.

Another huge problem is keywords; people know about keywords, but do not understand the need for keyword research. Generic keywords for your products or service are simply not good enough. Your keywords have to be search specific and product specific.

Generic keywords will get your website simply lost in the SERPs. Keyword research does not stop once you have sharply focussed keywords in place. Search patterns and the way people search change continuously and you have to keep up with that. Keywords that work excellent at the moment may be completely outdated or simply not popular anymore next month. Regular keyword research is vital.

Customers come first

Your optimisation efforts should be for the search engines in easily crawlable web content, a good site map and excellent links that are valuable and related to your own website. Everything on your website must be geared towards making your site visitors happy. If your website is not user friendly, you will simply lose them.

On average you have roughly 10 seconds to convince a site visitor to stay once he or she lands on your website. That is an incredibly short period of time. If you want to achieve success there has to be full collaboration between you, your website designer and your SEO expert. Your ego and what you think is “cool” should take a backseat and your potential customers should take front seat. A beautifully designed website that brings in no site visitors is meaningless and not following the basic principles of SEO throughout your entire website means your potential customers will not ever find your website.

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