How To Avoid These Ten Costly Search Engine Mistakes

If you have a website then you already know the importance of traffic.Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It's the onlything that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to yoursite, you will not make any sales.

Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated todrive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is thesearch engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it's going to cost you.Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product)traffic is the least expensive method known.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of searchengine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance onproducing a "pretty" website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondaryto search engine placement. Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes,made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic toyour site...after all, isn't that what you want.

1. Not using keywords effectively.
This is probably oneof the most critical area of site design. Choose the right keywords andpotential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site willsee little, if any, traffic.

2. Repeating the same keywords.
When you use the samekeywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) the search engines maydowngrade (or skip) the page or site.

3. Robbing pages from other websites.
How many times haveyou heard or read that "this is the Internet and it's ok" to steal icons andtext from websites to use on your site. Don't do it. Its one thing to learn fromothers who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The searchengines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may evenprevent you from ever being listed by them.

4. Using keywords that are not related to yourwebsite.
Many unethical website owners try to gain search enginevisibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website.They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as "sex", the name of a knowncelebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page.The keyword doesn't have anything to do with the page topic. However, since thekeyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This techniqueis considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimesthe whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing.

5. Keyword stuffing.
Somewhat like keyword stackinglisted above, this means to assign multiple keywords to the description of agraphic or layer that appears on your website by using the "alt=" HTMLparameter. If the search engines find that this text does not really describethe graphic or layer it will be considered spam.

6. Relying on hidden text.
You might be inclined to thinkthat if you cannot see it, it doesn't hurt. Wrong.... Do not try to hide yourkeywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, someunethical designers my set the keywords to the same color as the background ofthe web page; thereby, making it invisible.

7. Relying on tiny text.
This is another version of theitem above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keywordphrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small thatit can barely be seen does this.

8. Assuming all search engines are the same.
Many peopleassume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each hastheir own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it apoint to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility.

9. Using free web hosting.
Do not use free web hosting ifyou are really serious about increasing site traffic via search enginevisibility. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these freehosts.

10. Forgetting to check for missing web pageelements.
Make sure to check every page in your website forcompleteness, like missing links, graphics, etc. There are sites on the web thatwill do this for free.

This is just a few of the methods and techniques that you should avoid. Donot give in to the temptation that these methods will work for you. They will domore harm than good for your website.

Not only will you spend weeks of wasted effort, you may have your site bannedfrom the search engines forever. Invest a little time to learn the propertechniques for increasing search engine visibility and your net traffic willincrease.

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