The Internet is the place for rumours and misconceptions as well as hard facts and untold amounts of great information. Unfortunately this has lead to mistakes in search engine optimisation that have been the cause of many online businesses having failed optimisation and marketing efforts.

Common deadly sins of SEO that beginners make

Optimisation cannot be implemented after a website had been designed. Optimisation should be an integral part of the website design during each stage. Failing to do this means you have a excellent website with zero web traffic. Trying to rectify it afterwards is a nightmare and cost your business hugely in lost customers. Content is king and without search friendly content you do not have a hope of being indexed.

Far too many people think that by having a website crammed with extravagant graphics is good enough. The web crawlers will ignore the graphics and without meaty content move on to other websites. Your web content must be keyword rich text that is appropriate to the page title, meaning the title should be include a term that the majority of searchers will use in a search for the products or services you offer.  Another common mistake is the lack of research into keywords.

You cannot simply go with a generalised keyword or phrase that describes what you offer. You must use keywords that tightly focus on those searchers who specifically search what you offer. Once you have those keywords you need to regularly update as the Internet is ever-changing. What worked this week may be totally inappropriate in a few weeks.

The Don’ts of SEO

Do not put all your eggs into one basket by relying mostly on paid search advertising. Balance between paid advertising and correct implementation of organic optimisation throughout your website. Do not build links for the sake of link numbers. You will shoot yourself in the foot if your links are inappropriate or not related to and compliment your own products and services. Do not underestimate the needs and wants of your web traffic, if you do you will have a very low conversion rate. Your conversion rate will be abysmal if your whole website is not supporting the conversion process with user friendly ways for visitors to easily become customers. You will lose them if they battle to place and order or cannot contact you.

Search engines will ignore you

There are a few things that search engines do not like, such as when you use graphics instead of text in your links. They do not like frames and they do not like splash pages. SE’s do not see graphics and if they battle to index your content you will be ignored and the web crawlers will not trawl your site regularly.

When this happens the bell is tolling for your website and you begin the slide into anonymity.  The golden rule is that search engines and humans look at web content entirely different. You have to attract the SE’s first before you will have web traffic to please.

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