Superstition: Putting keywords in the meta tag will get your page a good search engine ranking all by itself.
Fact: If only it was this easy, everyone would have a perfectly optimized website. There must be keywords in the copy on the page, not just in your meta tags. In fact, if keywords only appear there, search engines are likely to consider it spam and penalize your site.
Superstition: Hidden links or text containing keywords on a page can boost your search engine rankings.
Fact: This is known as keyword stuffing, and can get your page banned or otherwise penalized if this is discovered. At one time, this was considered a great way to boost your search engine ranking, but it is now considered to be spamming by many search engines.
Superstition: The more reciprocal links to other sites you have, the higher your Google page rank goes.
Fact: Having your website linked to the wrong pages; for instance, link farms and FFA pages can negatively affect your ranking. What you want is inbound links from quality websites. No one is exactly sure how Google determines PR with these links; one inbound link which is relevant to your site have much more value for your page ranking than do lots of irrelevant links to (or from) your site.
Superstition: Most sites are optimized. What chance do I have of standing out?
Fact: Studies show that up to 60% of all websites are not properly optimized to rank high in search engines. The nature of search engines makes it difficult for web designers to properly optimize web pages for their clients. Always discuss optimization with your web designer to determine what services are included in the project.
Superstition: The more times you repeat the keyword in the page, the higher it will rank.
Fact: The search engines each have their own criteria for determining page rankings. While keyword density is important, it's not the only thing which search engines look at. They also don't tell you what the optimal keyword density is for their search engine. A keyword density which is either too high or too low is penalized. There are those who state that optimum keyword density is 3%, while others say 6% - no one really knows for sure.
Superstition: Once your site is indexed by search engines, changes made to your site will not affect your ranking.
Fact: The opposite is true. In fact, you must update your website as often as you can manage to do so. Even fixing a broken link can help you out here - search engines will stop sending spiders if they keep running into broken links on your site. Updating and changing you content will ensure regular visits form the search engines bots.
Superstition: Robots.txt file and sitemaps aren't necessary.
Fact: Search engine bots look for the robots.txt file first, since this file tells them what they are allowed to index and what to crawl while on your site. A site map also has the advantage that the search bots will follow each link therein. This is a way to ensure that your site is comprehensively indexed. These two files (sitemap and robots.txt) should be placed in the root level directory of your domain.
Superstition: Search engines cannot index pages with Flash and using Flash in your page will lower it's ranking.
Fact:While search engines do not index the Flash movie itself, they will index the text of the movie (you need to specify Flash text in your HTML) along with the rest of your page. Flash has no effect on the site itself in terms of indexing and does not keep your site from being crawled either. What search engines don't like is websites which automatically re-direct, including Flash pages which do this. It's the redirection, not the Flash which is the problem here.
About the Author:
Robert Gantt has taught 100's of online businesses how to promote their products and make more money online. Discover how to increase your sales, get better cashflow and increase your customer base with targeted effective online marketing The Complete Online Resource Guide
No comments:
Post a Comment