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Search Engines and Your Website
Part 2 - Dos and Don'ts
By John Joyce, President
Red, Incorporated
Strategic Marketing and Design
In
Part One we covered the very basics: what is search engine optimization, how does it benefit my business and how do search engines work. In this article we will be looking at some Dos and Don'ts to keep in mind when developing your search engine strategy.
Did he just say 'search engine strategy', you may be asking yourself. Does it really require a
strategy? Well, that brings us to our first 'Do'.
DO have a strategy.
Before you begin experimenting with search engine optimization (SEO), do some research and have a strategy in mind. Your strategy should include investigating what keywords people may be using to search for you most often (see
http://www.wordtracker.com), as well as a plan for writing articles for your website on topics closely related to those keywords (remember:
content is king). Be prepared to encounter a lot of 'snake-oil' salesmen when researching SEO though - selling all kinds of tricks, which leads us right to our first Don't.
DON'T fall for it.
There are a lot of get-traffic-quick schemes out there. They won't help you and they might even hurt you. The search engine programmers know all these tricks too, and are actively doing their absolute best to counteract for them to preserve the quality of their results.
Here are some popular tricks to AVOID like the plague:
- Keyword Spamming (repeating keywords over and over on the page or using non-relevant keywords like 'Britney Spears' - unless of course you're really into Britney, in that case stop reading this right now and call for help.)
- Invisible Text (hiding extra keywords on the page in a color that matches the website background color)
- Link Farms (links from free-link web sites which really have nothing to do with your site or it's content)
- Content Stealing (copying content from other higher ranking sites and hiding it in your pages)
- Cloaking (a website which shows one version of content to visitors and another version rigged for supposedly higher rankings to search engine's crawlers)
DO use your page tags
The next Do addresses the makeup of your pages themselves. You need to make sure that your keywords appear in your title tag, and in the keywords meta tag. Don't try to make every page rank for every single keyword, choose a few keywords for each page which correspond with that page's content. Also, make sure that your description meta tag contains a nice readable description of you or your page - since many search engines will display this description in the search results.
DON'T use vague keywords
Targeted keywords help you stand out, vague keywords make you blend in, or get lost entirely. For instance, you may sell widgets, but trying to rank high for widgets puts you in direct competition with 200,000 other widget companies. A better strategy might be to use keyword phrases such as 'aluminum widgets' or 'widgets akron' or even 'aluminum widgets akron'. With keywords like these you will be competing against far less websites for high rankings and it also may help you get more targeted traffic - visitors who are looking more specifically for products or services you actually sell.
There is much more to be said about this topic than we have room for here, and there are plenty of other's taking about it. Even if you plan on hiring a professional to help with your search engine results, I recommend that you do some research on the web and learn as much as you can before spending ANY money. Thanks for reading!
