Affiliate Marketing – Best Free Wordpress Poker Theme

Many new users and even those with more experience of the net will make mistakes when they are starting out in the process of boosting their site so that it ranks more highly in the search engines. The biggest mistake many of us make is listening to unfounded advice, going with the latest rumours circulating online or simply going with our instincts to our detriment. Have you ever fallen in the trap of making changes to site layout, content or backlinks only to fall in the ranks without being able to identify exactly why you were ’supposed’ to change in the first place?

The fact is, there can be many reasons why your site falls in the ranks or doesn’t achieve the success you expected from some new initiative you have undertaken. There may be things that are in your control and also things you cannot be able to manage. When the search engine changes the algorithms it uses to rank sites or when the competition changes in your field. While there will always be things beyond your control, I’d like to focus here on how to manage those things that you can do – showing you some SEO tips that you may not even know about.

Have you been in the habit of freshening the appearance and content on your website frequently? If you are and you don’t give SEO any thought in this process – then this could be one of the main reasons your site is falling in the ranks.

If you have changed any of the titles of your pages or changed the name of some important directories then you will most likely see this cause a drop in your search engine rank. The most important thing if you have made mistakes in the past is ultimately how to avoid repeating them in future.

When Dealing With Google, Yahoo and MSN – Ignorance is no excuse

While you may break the ‘rules’ with the search engines unwittingly, the bottom line is that this won’t save you from being penalised. If you want to avoid this however, here are the top 5 SEO mistakes that you should avoid at all costs.

1.) Site Layout, Page Design and Usability: Be careful when you design your website that you don’t go over the top using too many fancy visual layouts and elaborate graphics that will reduce your textual content. If you do redesign your site, then make sure that you are careful in your selection and quantity of images used. Also exercise caution with embedding content and navigational links in images on the site. The content and visible links are what the search engines will use when they index your site. As a guideline, the average web page should contain at least 200 to 300 words. Use your keywords naturally in the text (without stuffing them in too much), and include navigational links that use the target keywords – especially with your internal linking.

2.) Choose Navigation Text Carefully: While using instructions such as “Click Here” will make it very clear for site visitors, then fact is that if a search engine visits your site, they will identify this as the most important words or phrase, even above your target words and phrases. The easiest way to avoid this is to use short keyword phrases that guide both site visitors and the search engines to other pages with targeted words. If your target words are “red rose bushes” for example, then you want the visitors to identify that is what you are about, so use the term “red rose bushes” in your hyper links. In the end, you want to rank for the term “red rose bushes” in order to reach your target audience – no one looking for your products is going to find you if your site just ranks for the term “Click Here”.

3.) SEO and Site Usability: If you use titles on your pages that are not focussed on your key phrases, then you will rank for the titles used, but you won’t do yourself any favours with respect to ranking for your key phrases. Clearly, this is not the result you are after. If you are reviewing your web site, then go through page by page and make sure that you have selected a meaningful, keyword rich title that will help boost your ranking for that phrase. Take some time when working on this section of your site to be sure that you have optimized the meta tags for your target keywords also. This is no longer believed to be an important aspect of the SEO for your site, it still pays to do this as it is a further chance to be sure that you have clearly identified your keywords and are ready to use them to stand apart from your competition. You should also take into consideration that this tag is the description that often appears in the search engine results that people will view in the search result pages.

4.) Work on Getting Quality Incoming Links: The popularity of your site is assessed when search engines decide where to position your site. Your goal needs to be to target relevant sites and have incoming links from keyword text. Don’t be tempted to take the easy option and use these to boost the number of links coming into your site regardless of content and keyword focus. The two major problems with this are that firstly, you are likely to be hosting all your sites on the one server, making it easily recognisable that you have linked your own sites. This is easy enough to trace, because the IP class will be easily recognisable to the search engines and this will alert spam triggers, resulting in your site being penalised. The second problem with creating links between your own sites is that you may have to use a broad range of keywords to achieve your result – which will reduce the value of the linking gains. Be careful not to use the same anchor text on a large number of incoming links, as this too can be something that alerts the search engines of suspicious activity. Remember that the web is an organic and naturally growing body, with its influences coming from a vast range of sources. People will do their own thing online, hence inbound links will arise from a variety of sources using their own anchor text wordings. If you are involved in activities such as link exchanges, using paid links or sourcing links from related website – be cautious of an unnaturally repetitive use of keywords for the anchor text as this will set off search engine spam alerts.

5.) Changes to Site Structure and Design: One thing to be careful of when making changes in your site structure is to be cautious of leaving page and directory names or orphaned pages listed with search engines. If you are changing web page names and directory names, then do so with great care. The older or more established the web pages are – the more potential for harm there is if you are not careful about how you remove or change web page URLs. There are a few straightforward steps you can take to get search engines indexing your new web pages within days, if not hours, with powerful new crawler agents. Essentially, after the new URL and its location has been registered by the search engines, this will continue to exist in the search engine database forever if you don’t rename or remove the page. Should you delete or rename a web page, then the search engine will remove that page from the index, which can include removing link popularity or Google Page Rank data. Losing this information means the benefits of this page are lost and its role boosting your website is forfeited, meaning a negative impact on site ranking and link popularity. If it is at all possible, aim to leave the URL of your page in place and rewrite the content for your page. The best option if you must delete or rename the web page is to use a “301 Permanent Redirect” to the new URL to preserve as much as possible of the past data for search engine ranking purposes.

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