The two-plus years I’ve come to know and love the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are also the same two years I’ve become a website perfectionist. I can’t surf my favorite online stores nowadays without noticing whether the title tags are all the same, or if the site is just a bit too image heavy. I went from looking at the cute tees and dresses to either admiring a site’s SEO tactics or grimacing and bouncing off the site. I even once e-mailed the web designer for a popular women’s clothing site and complimented them on their on-page SEO techniques. It’s been an eye-opening two years where I’ve come to have a very close relationship with the SEO industry (eat, breathe, sleep SEO), and it’s given me time to pause from thinking about how to improve client rankings to, well, pondering how a site owner can ruin SEO rankings. Take a few minutes to learn what not to do in SEO.
Stagnant SEO
Here’s a great way to ruin your SEO: Do nothing about it! Many site owners feel that they can sit back and relax, and search engines will eventually just notice that they have a great site. Not so. Although I wish search engines would show love to every site out there, it’s just not going to happen. You, as a site owner, need to stand up and take charge of your site’s SEO. Read expert SEO articles at established SEO blogs such as the Solid Cactus SEO Blog at http://SEOBlog.SolidCactus.com, SEOmoz.org, and SearchEngineWatch.com. Learn the tips and techniques to get your site on the path to SEO success in the ever changing world of SEO.
Keywords, Keywords Everywhere
Just like the What-Not-To-Wear crew says about your wardrobe, moderation is also key in SEO. Adding a paragraph of 20 keyword phrases to your homepage isn’t going to help your SEO – It will send a red flag to search engines that you may not be employing the most ethical SEO practices. Keep your site and search engine optimized copy sounding as natural as possible.
News Flash! My Site Isn’t Ranking
Flash websites often look beautiful, but they’re not the best for increasing your keyword rankings. Balance out a Flash
or image heavy site by creating informative text on the site describing the business’ products and services, and writing useful articles from which the average user can benefit.
Who Has Time to Write?
You want to add more content to your site, but don’t have time to write it, so instead, you simply pull some great copy off a competitor’s site. Congratulations, you just ruined your rankings. Your website should have unique copy that will engage your visitors. Set aside a few hours or hire a professional SEO copywriter to write unique content for your site. Investing your time or a few dollars will only help your rankings, and online business, see success.
If I Can Pay Someone to Write, Can’t I Buy, Links, too?!
Sigh, if I had a dime for every time a site owner asked that question I’d have… ruined SEO rankings! Link building, the practice of adding your link on another website to propel your own rankings to increase, is not an easy task, but must be done by hand. Whether you consult an SEO professional or contact websites or blogs in your industry and personally ask them to link to you, buying links from paid link services or cheap, low quality directories with thousands of unrelated links is an absolute N-O. I’ve personally seen a site jump from page ten in Google to page four just by having the site owner remove one paid link from a low quality site.
In addition to avoiding paid link services and spammy directories, be sure your links associate only with a good neighborhood of sites. Look for established sites that have a solid amount of incoming traffic or a Page Rank of three and above with which to link. You wouldn’t want the search engines to catch you on the wrong side of the tracks by linking to completely unrelated sites or sites that employ the same techniques we‘re warning you to avoid!
Title Tag – Same As Every Other Page
The title tag is the short phrase located at the very top of your Internet browser. It gives both human visitors and search engine spiders a quick glimpse of what can be found on that page, and can be extremely helpful for your search engine rankings. I’ve seen many sites with the same title tag on each and every page of the site – usually just the website address. Create unique title tags, just as we did for our Solid Cactus site, including our SEO page – “Solid Cactus – Search Engine Optimization Provides Online Store Visibility & Profitability”. We know it can be quite daunting to create a unique title tag for every page on your site, so our good friends in the Store Development side of Solid Cactus created our popular “Dynamically Generated Title Tags” feature to help you.
Who Cares About Anchor Text?
Search engines do, that’s who. Anchor text, the words used to describe a link, can give search engines a clue on what keyword phrases best describe your site’s products and services, and in turn rank your site higher for those keyword phrases. When creating copy on your site and including links to other pages within your site, use a natural sounding, two to three word anchor text that includes a keyword phrase for which you would like to rank.
Choosing the Lowest Price SEO Consultant
As with all things in life, you often get what you pay for in SEO. It’s usually best to leave your SEO in the hands of an SEO professional, but be sure to look at more than just the price of the services. What do they offer? Are they up to date on the latest SEO techniques? What kind of SEO reporting do they offer? Here’s one way to tell how legit they are: If they guarantee page one rankings right from the start, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about, and will have you ranked for an overly long keyword phrase that no one ever actually searches.
Heed these tips on how not to ruin your SEO rankings, and hopefully, you won’t take a step backward on the path to your site’s SEO success. Our friendly team of SEO Specialists at Solid Cactus is always here to help, and we’ve made many a client happy with increased traffic, revenue, and rankings. Check out our SEO Blog at http://seoblog.solidcactus.com for SEO tips and techniques, and feel free to drop me an e-mail at alicia.magda@solidcactus.com if you’d like to really see what we can do for your site’s SEO.
By Alicia Magda
aliciam@ebizinsider.com
