Seo

Most people today seem to understand that they need to optimize their website for search engines. However, with the vast amount of conflicting information on the internet today, many people are still getting it wrong. In recent investigations, it has been found that one out of three websites has at least one of the following seven issues on their website.

Check your website for the following seven mistakes:

1. Description Tag – The description tag is supposed to describe the page on your website. It should not be used to stuff keywords for search engines. This tag should be about 25 words long and it should include your keywords as part of the normal sentence structure. You also shouldn’t overdo it; a whole paragraph is not going to improve your results.

2. Keyword Tag – The keyword tag is meant to hold the keywords you want your site listed for. The tags should represent the things visitors can find on that particular page. Do not use things from other pages on your site or keywords that you think people might search for if they are not part of your site. The keyword tag should only contain twenty words or less; do not go over.

You also shouldn’t repeat the keywords more than three times. For example, if you sell shoes, you shouldn’t put red shoes, blue shoes, black shoes, tennis shoes, and basketball shoes. You should only use the word shoes three times and each of the descriptions three times.

3. Anchor Text – Many people think that they should use the name of the link they are providing on their webpage. This could not be further than the truth. Search engines want to see your keywords used as anchor text whenever possible.

4. Title Tag – This is one of the most important aspects of your website. It is the very first thing a search engine will see when it comes to your page and this is what the engine will look at to decide what your page is about. Don’t include your url in your title tag and your company name should not be in the beginning of the description either. Don’t go over 60 words.

5. Keywords In Your Text – Your keywords should be included within the text of your page. They should flow as a part of the normal sentence structure, and should not be stuffed into sentences that don’t make sense. The keywords used on your page should be the same ones you used in your title and description.

6. Abstract Tag – many people are now using abstract tags within their sites. Some are replacing the description tag with an abstract and stuffing it full of unnecessary keywords. This should never be done. Most experts agree that an abstract tag is just that abstract. Leave it out.

Search engines use spiders to probe and fetch data from your website. Spiders, also known as web crawlers, are just some of the friendly beasts dwelling on the online ecosystem. These tiny beasts are programmed to procure the answers to basic questions to your website design and content such as “What is your website about?”, “Is your website in a good neighborhood?”, and “Is your website functional?”

Web developers, designers, and administrators need to befriend these beasts in order to succeed in search engine optimization (SEO). Here are 5 tips on how to befriend and tame these peculiar beasts.

1. Remove the barricades

If you are using a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, Blogger, Magento, Drupal, etc.), you do not have to worry too much about blocking spiders because these platforms were designed with the spiders in mind. Owners and administrators of e-commerce websites have more problems because of their dynamic content as the URLs generated can sometimes block bots because of the special characters in it. Make sure to transform these URLs into more search engine-friendly (SEF) ones, and the spiders will love your site.

2. Do not spoil spiders’ favorite meal

Content is a spider’s favorite meal. Avoid putting too much “content spice” into the meal you are preparing as it can signal the spiders that you are using artificial ingredients. SEO specialists have debated over the years on how rich the meal should be. Will a 300 word article seasoned with keywords be satisfying enough for the spiders to consume? Will a flavorless 5,000 word article be too much that will cause the spiders to choke? Do not linger over this matter too long because the spiders cannot digest all your articles equally well, anyway. Write articles naturally long enough to present your point. Put generous amount of keywords that would make spiders salivate.

3. Spiders love fresh content

Nowadays, many businesses, particularly the big brands, are behaving more like newspapers than merchants. The online community has seen an upsurge in the number of blog usage in business. Fresh content signals the spiders that your site has authority on your specific line of business; however, not all businesses can afford to serve a fresh new meal every day but the advantage of feeding the spiders on a daily basis is favorable because it can train them to visit your site more frequently.

4. Spiders hate junk foods

Spiders were trained to distinguish high quality and original content from the poorly or artificially prepared ones. What they do is they devour whatever you have prepared on your site and they crawl back to their lair and report directly to the higher-level beasts – Panda and Penguin, who are responsible for deciding your website’s fate. Not feeding the spiders is better than giving them keyword stuffed paragraphs, hidden text, and other junk food prepared by black hat chefs.

5. Invite the spiders

If you are posting fresh content regularly, or if your website is new, spiders will show up eventually as soon as they smell the meal that you have prepared. But you can invite them to visit your site by submitting your sitemap directly to their master, Google, through the use of the Webmaster Tools. In that way, Google will have a glimpse of the menu that you have prepared for the spiders.

At Poxse Digital Marketing, we make sure that every website is designed to be fully crawl-able by search engine spiders, guaranteeing better search engine results page rankings, which lead to improved online visibility and enhanced marketing opportunities.

The Internet is one of the biggest industries to get involved with lately, and in order to be successful, you typically need to acquire some SEO services one way or another.

Whether you are providing this to your own business, or whether you are outsourcing these services to another company, you need to make sure you are familiar with the common mistakes made.

If you know the mistakes, you can do your best to correct them and if they do occur, you can spot them quickly and fix them!

Below are a few of the common mistakes made with SEO services:

1) Black Hat SEO services: Unfortunately, there are some shady companies out there. As is with every industry, there are ethical companies and there are some not so ethical companies and the search engine industry is no different.

You definitely need to do your research prior to committing to any company, because unfortunately it is you who will be punished if you used unacceptable techniques!

Some black hat SEO tactics are keyword stuffing (using too many keywords to ‘trick’ the search engines), false reciprocal back linking (promise to return the link but failing to do so), link farms and many more. Unfortunately, these methods have the potential to get you banned from search engines, so be careful.

2) Failing to do the research: You can hire the best SEO services company in the world, but if they don’t do the research (or you don’t do the research), it could be all for nothing and you will have wasted a pretty penny. You need to understand your competitors, and understand your target market.

Only once you do this, will your search engine tactics be successful. How can you expect to pick the right keywords and post on the right blog sites if you don’t know what your customers are searching for? How can you expect to oust your competition if you cannot improve upon their mistakes?

3) Ignoring the optimization of your own site. So you’re getting a lot of visitors to your site? Great! However, if your own site isn’t optimized, you will have a hard time converting your visitors to sales.

If you have a slow load time, your visitors will get impatient and leave, so get rid of any unnecessary videos and large photos. Keep it simple and easy to navigate – if you have a site map, not only will customers be able to find their way around, so will search engine spiders, and this is great! Make sure you maintain fresh and new content so there is something different each time your customers visit!

These are just a few of the mistakes made in SEO services, so make sure you are on the ball and can avoid them!

Businesses with websites are constantly being told that they need plenty of keyword rich articles in order for their site to achieve any great ranking in the search engines, but is this the absolute truth? Do ALL sites require lots of keyword rich content in order to succeed, or can some sites get away without it?

Let’s start off by discussing WHY SEO articles have been promoted as being necessary. The search engines use the content on a page to decide how relevant the page is for particular keywords or search terms.

Therefore, the more information on the page about something in particular, the higher the page should rank (provided, of course, it has enough backlinks as well as other SEO in place). This makes sense, BUT it doesn’t always make sense to have sites full of keyword filled SEO articles.

For example, if you have an ecommerce site with a shopping cart and you’re selling lots and lots of articles, do you REALLY need all your pages to be full of articles? Well, not really. Obviously if you’re selling a product you want to include relevant information about the product for your potential buyers, but you don’t need several hundred words discussing the history of each and every product on your site. Visitors to your site will be those who are looking to buy Product X, not read several hundred words about Product X!

In fact, if you do a search for any popular product online, you’ll probably find several shopping sites all selling the product, most which won’t have reams of irrelevant information about it, just the basic information any searcher needs in order to decide whether or not to buy the product, and the all important “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button.

This is not to say that a site shouldn’t be content rich. Your site needs quality content, but you need to look at your site not just from the search engine’s perspective, but from the perspective of visitors to your site. Naturally, if you’re creating a site full of information then you’ll need to provide content in the form of articles, videos or whatever media you’re choosing to educate your visitors. However, if your just selling products, it doesn’t always make sense to have reams of articles about your products.

What if you’re an offline business, what sort of site do you need then? Obviously, if you’re looking for visitors (both to your site and to your place of business) you’ll have to provide them the sort of information they’re looking for. If you’re an accountant, for example, you may wish to provide information about the various accounting services your firm specializes in.

This means, if you’re writing articles for your site (or having someone write them for you), you want them to be specific to your firm and to describe exactly what services you perform. What you include on your site MUST be relevant to your business. You don’t want a general article about “accounting”, because anyone looking for your site is probably going to have some idea of what accounting is. In fact, they’ll most likely be looking for a particular firm in your area to do business with.

What does this mean? It means to look at your site from the perspective of potential visitors. What do THEY want from your site? More importantly, what sort of information are they going to expect your site to provide for them?

It’s pretty certain that if they’re looking for information about a product they want to buy, they’re not going to want to sift through several hundred words of irrelevant nonsense about the product! If they’re looking for a local accounting firm or law firm, they’re equally not going to want to read several hundred words about “accounting” or “law”!

This means that if you’re looking for cheap and easy SEO articles to fill your website, you may have to think again. If you do need to have your writing outsourced, you may need to pay a little more and get quality writing that is very specific to the services or goods you’re offering on your site. High quality text IS important, but only if it meets the needs of your visitors.

It is still possible to use keywords effectively in your content, without overwhelming your visitor with irrelevant rubbish! Remember that some of the most successful sites have very little in the way of keyword rich content (think of how popular YouTube videos are, for example, or products on websites like Amazon) because they’re well set up sites and they have a lot of popularity in the form of good quality backlinks.