Saturday, January 24, 2009

Common Mistakes Made by Webmasters Seeking Better Site Rating

By Irmin J. Roybal

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a bit tricky business and some webmasters especially at the beginning of their web career are trying to take a shortcut. Here are several typical errors, which can be made in attempt to improve site rating fast, but usually leading to just opposite results.

Graphic Header It is standard and tasty to have a bitmap with a nice graphics on top of your page view. Logo, smiling faces or something else really eye-catching depending on the nature of the site is always nice to have there, your visitors would like it and expect it to be there. Unfortunately, SE robots has a different point. They assign highest value to all words at the top of the page, especially to those which are set under h1 tag. Best tactics: before giving this valuable space to wordless pics (words within graphic file are still graphics), to post h1 heading with crucial keywords above the graphic header.

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.

Redundant usage of h1 tag The words posted under h1 (heading 1) tag are assigned higher rank. Usage of keyword phrases under h1 heading is a must. However, making more than one limited string under h1 tag, or tagging this way whole text is punishable. It is safer to use h2 and h3 tags for other headings, and keep h1 used just once.

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! - 15431