WSI Web Science Blog

The term, “search engine optimization” is often referred to as an acronym, “SEO.” When executed correctly, a well-researched SEO web site will generate massive amounts of traffic. However, if you’re not familiar with SEO tactics and you do something incorrectly with your web site, you could get penalized by the search engines and that would mean diminished traffic to your site.

To help you not make those newbie-type mistakes, this article attempts to give you several fast track lessons of what not to do.

 

• If you’re not using a site map to inform the search engines of what’s included on your site, make sure you don’t link many lines of hyperlinked keyword phrases in the footer of your web site, especially if each of those linked pages contains less than 300 words of fresh content. Pages without sufficient content stand a chance of not getting indexed.

 

• It’s a tedious task, but it’s important that you don’t forget to check the internal and external links to your site. If your hyperlinks are broken or do not point to a live web page, it’s very common that your site will not get indexed into the search engines.

 

• One of the biggest mistakes you can make in your SEO efforts is to skimp on web content on your pages and to display mainly banners, affiliate links, or pay-per-click advertisements. The search engines will not deem your site as helpful to visitors if all that’s displayed in 90 percent of adverts rather than written content that will help the customer.

 

• When you do not work at getting back links from high page ranking sites that contain the same keyword that’s included in your HTML source code, the value of your site sinks rapidly.

 

• Do not try to manipulate the keywords on your web site to get more recognized hits by using a famous person’s name or a product’s brand name when the products or services you offer have nothing to do with famous people or products. Google especially looks down on that type of misrepresentation.

 

• Be careful with your page’s naming conventions. Avoid using abbreviations, shortened versions of words, or words that don’t pertain to the content or products on a specific page. For example, if your page is about golf lessons, then create a web page with the name: golf-lessons.html rather than lessons.html.