Common Mistakes Made by Webmasters Seeking Better Site Rating
Doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to some degree flirting with robots, so certain caution must be exercised. Webmasters, especially beginners, may tend to forget about it, and make mistakes. Since such mistakes can lead to reduced or even ruined rating of the site, it is good not to make them in a first place or fix immediately upon reading of this text.
Graphic Header It is always nice to have a catchy graphic piece on top of the page picturing the logo and crowds of satisfied customers. Yes, humans tend to react positively to a vision of smiling faces, so nice graphic heading is always inviting. SE crawler may have a different vision, though. It looks for heading with h1 tag and keywords, or better for both at the very top of the page. If it will not find it there because of a space taken by the graphics, it may leave the site with a different (comparing to human visitor) idea about site quality. To avoid such nuisance, it is good to have h1-tagged title with the keywords before the graphics.
Hidden Text Seem like a smart idea to stuff the site with a thousand of keywords, make them white on white (or place them in no script areas of the code), so humans will not see them, but robots will swallow them all to their complete satisfaction and great rating for the site. Even smarter idea: avoid anything that can be even considered as this type of spamdexing, it may cost the site its reputation.
Redundant usage of h1 tag The words posted under h1 (heading 1) tag are assigned higher rank. Usage of keyword phrases under h1 heading is a must. However, making more than one limited string under h1 tag, or tagging this way whole text is punishable. It is safer to use h2 and h3 tags for other headings, and keep h1 used just once.
Final Tip. The advice given here is for SEO only. So, please, dont forget that your site is supposed to serve people (hopefully), not web spiders. Besides, SEO is one of the major, but still not the only way of making your site visible. It is not a good idea to base your traffic on SEO only: a change in SE algorithms can cost you a substantial part of traffic. It is much better and safer to combine all possible means for attracting visitors to your site.
Good luck!
Tagged with: SEO
Filed under: SEO
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