SEO Don'ts - The 15 Mistakes You Should Avoid

You do SEO for the future. If you market your site with press releases but don’t optimize it for search engines, then you’ll have to keep writing press releases indefinitely. When the press releases stop, your website traffic is likely to stop as well. Another common mistake is that many organizations think the process completed once a site is launched. They don't realize that the web site needs to be promoted much like any other product or service. That’s why SEO should be continuously kept in mind to enhance your web performance. Last article, we mentioned some good tips in SEO and of course, along with any list of Do’s come the Don’ts. Then here they are…

1. Having no content

Your website needs content. The search engines need something to rank and you need a way to show authority with users and answer their questions. If you want to create a site that is rich in content and a popular resource amongst internet surfers, then adding quality, unique content is a must. Sure, the search engines like it too. It shows them your site is worthy of being ranked because it’s actively growing with information related to the theme of your site.



2. Lack of consistency and maintenance

If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines. If you optimize your site today, you won’t see the results of your work tomorrow. You might not see the results even after a couple of months. Search engine optimization, like building a business, takes time to pay off. Therefore, try to focus on your long-term goals. Be patient, and keep working away at it. Eventually, your SEO efforts can turn into a steady flow of free qualified traffic to your website — potential customers coming to you. That’s a result worth waiting for.



3. Choosing keywords you can’t win

Even experienced SEO experts can make this mistake. People usually choose keywords in their mind that are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. Or people may focus on very popular keywords which may not be relevant to the site. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords. In fact, choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Most of the sites fail to do enough research on keywords. Using good keyword selection tools, such as Google Adwords Keywords and WordTracker, will help you find keywords that are good for your site. Be thorough in your research, don’t just do it once and forget it. Use as many tools as you can get your hands on – look at web stats and look at the logs for the search feature on your site – get a feel for what people are looking for.



4. Keyword Spamming and Stuffing

Many people may already understand is that keyword stuffing is an SEO technique of the past that should be avoided. Piling up the unrelated keywords needs to be reduced because most of the popular search engines including Google go through the content of the whole page. Therefore they index only the relevant keywords. So, just adding unnecessary keywords is useless. Don’t stuff keywords in your meta tags, image alt tags, etc. Don’t stuff keywords in your page footer with lightly-colored or hidden text.



5. Ignoring the Title tag and Meta tags

A common mistake is overlooking the importance of the title tag. More significant than the name of your business is what your business is all about. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your title tag shows in the search results as your page title. Therefore tag should contain the most focused keywords.



Similarly, though you may think that meta tags do no good to your page rank but it cannot be a possible reason to leave your meta descriptions. The search engine research pages vary the description of your web page according to the search keywords. So it’s better to define your web page in the best way you think it will drag a reader towards your site. The tags you put in should be suffice and able to correlate to your page. A good optimized meta description can increase your CTR significantly. Also, a lot of search engines other than Google rely heavily on meta description for ranking your site.



6. Ignoring URLs

Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keyword in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.



7. JavaScript Menus

Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap so that all your links will be crawlable.



8. Poor internal linking

We talk a lot about the power of links in SEO. You want people to link to you with keyword-rich anchor text as a way of telling the search engines that you are relevant to those terms. Well, then why aren’t you linking to yourself the same way? When you’re linking between pages on your site, make sure you’re using preferred anchor text to give yourself a boost in the search engines and give users a keyword-rich path to follow. You may not be able to control how other people link to you, but you can control how you link within your own site. Make it count.



9. Flash website without an html alternative

Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. Great content embedded into a Flash website get invisible by the search engines. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Similarly with Splash pages. A good alternative to both issues is to make use of a flash header. There’s no problem to include a flash animation at the top of your main site, or as a feature within the content area, etc. Because this is an addition to your web site, as opposed to a full separate element.



10. Overusing graphics instead of text

Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Therefore, if you are too graphics-rich, you. Most search engines are not programmed to read graphics but instead look for text. may be bypassed by the search engines. An image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because heading tags and menu links are important SEO items. Whenever you’re using a photo, make sure there is also relevant text to accompany it.



11. Backlink spamming

It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are always better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newsgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need is quality backlinks.



12. Ignoring local.

You’re loco if you don’t do local! Therefore, make sure your site is listed in the relevant local engines or directories. Make sure your site is optimized for mobile! According to a recent survey, 1 out of 3 smartphone users have been led to a local business after finding in through local mobile search. Danielle Nohe, director, technology and entertainment for Compete, is calling on local businesses to optimize their sites for mobile/smartphone users.



13. Ignoring social media/networking

SEO and social media are interconnected in a way that many people don’t want to admit or acknowledge. Social media is not just a passing trend that is a distraction from “real work” – social media does impact SEO and it can increase exposure and traffic for your site. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to do it (if you care about keeping your site on the forefront). If it’s overwhelming, start with getting a killer Facebook Fan Page up and work on building fans, and then introduce Twitter and then move on to YouTube. It’s OK to do it in stages, just make sure you are working towards social media mastery.



14. Ignoring the trends in the industry

Search engines and social media sites make changes often. Staying current is important for many reasons: you want to be sure your site is cutting edge and taking advantage of all strategies and techniques that are proven to work, you also want to make sure you aren’t wasting your time on old school stuff that doesn’t work. SearchEngineJournal is a great place to stay current and hear all the latest and greatest!



15. Over-optimized pages

Sometimes people go off the deep end after learning about SEO. They start creating overly keyword-rich pages in an effort to move their rankings upwards. This can quickly make for a poor user experience, resulting in a decrease in conversion rates and/or the site being less attractive for others to link to.



Even organizations that are aware of SEO's importance have a tendency to start the process too late. The best way to prevent these mistakes from happening is with education. If you need help with putting that together, hire a senior SEO professional to come in and do the job for you. Once they understand the business implications of their decisions, most senior managers will make far better decisions about the website and SEO.

SEO Dos - The 10 Essential Techniques for Your Website

It can be very difficult for small businesses to compete on a global level for competitive terms with high profile companies, especially on a small business budget. But that doesn’t mean with hard work and determination that you can’t be competitive and build and market your brand and website successfully. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an opportunity for small businesses to enhance their performance within a limited budget. SEO now becomes a hot topic with a lot of debates. How do you get your web site within the first page or two of the search engines? How do you increase your Google page rank? Here are the 10 SEO tips that would be useful for your website.

1. Content

There is no surprise that content formatting and presentation for the content are the main part of SEO process to build up interest and create huge amount of traffic to a website. Quality content should be compelling, informative, relevant and updated. You can put all the keywords you want in the meta tags, titles, image tags, etc., but if the actual readable text on the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it ends up basically being a futile attempt. Quality content will bring people back and create word of mouth to get forward links from other sites. The more the better!



2. Website Design

First of all, spend some money on web design to attract more visitors. In addition, going hand in hand with web design is developing user experience. It is better to spend some time with a professional web developer who has experience with site usability. Placement of elements in a web design really do matter, and the navigation of your site is very important if you want your visitors to effectively find and meet your end goals.



3. Keyword Density

This is very important section of your SEO crusade. Keyword research can guide you about which keywords have high volume or least competition. However, you should be smart in keyword strategy, by not relying on popular keywords but also looking into long-tail keyword options and local search results. In addition, a look out on keyword density, which is the percent that your keyword or keyword phrase area of your web page text, is also important in SEO



4. Incoming Links

Link building is probably one of the most important parts of any SEO campaign. Back links must be collected from different off page SEO activities and only quality back links are considered by Google. The more links you have the more often you are going to be crawled. It is also important to make sure that you have content that is worth linking to on your site. Instead of spending the time, effort and money on artificial links, put that into your own site content or SEO budget and watch others link to you willingly and naturally.



5. Meta Tags

Meta tags are placed in the head section of a web page. Some people may tell that meta tags don’t matter. The biggest thing they matter for is click-through though. There will be a lot of times when Google will use your meta description as the copy that gets pulled with your search listing. This can help to attract the visitor to visit your web site if it is related to their search query. Therefore, meta tag content is actually known as a weapon for top search engine positions; however, this is not as easy as it looks like. For adding content, description and keywords in Meta tag it requires a lot of research. Be sure to include a few relevant keywords in this tag, but don’t stuff it with keywords either. The description tag should read like a sentence — not a keyword list.



6. Heading tags

Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good website will have. When you are laying out your site’s content you have to be sure that you are creating the content flow in such a way that the heading tags are based on prominence. The most prominent of course being the heading tag, which says this is what this block of copy is about. That’s the little “tooltip” that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links.



Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people see.



7. Domain, URL Structure & Website Title

First, it can help to have keywords you are interested in ranking for within your domain, but only as much as the title, heading and content matters. One very important factor that is coming to light is that domain age is important. The older the site or domain, the better it is not spam and can do well in search results. The domain age definitely isn’t a make or break factor but it does help quite a bit.



Second, ensuring that your URL structure compliments the content that is on the corresponding page is pretty important. Complex URLs are often dubbed dirty URLs because they tend to be littered with punctuation and identifiers that are at best irrelevant to the search engines. Having a descriptive URL still assists search engines in determining what is on a page



Last, making sure that you have the right web site titles for your pages is extremely important. The keywords you place in your title are important in order to ensure that your topic is understood by Google. One of the primary factors for ranking is if the title is on-topic with the search results. Not only is it important for robots to index and understand the topic of the page either. Try to put keywords that describe your product / services optimally in title of a page to get good results. It is important for click-through rates in the search results.



8. Internal Linking & Sitemaps

Making sure that your internal linking helps robots and visitors to find the content on your site is huge. Using relevant copy throughout your site will tell the robots and of course, visitors more effectively what to expect on the corresponding page. You do want to make sure that on pages you don’t want to rank in Google that you add a no-follow tag to ensure that the ranking flow of your site corresponds with your site’s topic and interests. No one is going to be searching Google to find out what your terms of service or privacy policy are.



In addition, search engines also use XML Sitemaps in order to index through your site. For a dynamic website, use of xml sitemap is very much essential. Otherwise crawlers will not be able to search all the pages of your website.



9. Image Optimization

Through Image optimization search engines can drive many visitors who search for images. Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes. In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site. The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings. In addition, including image alt attributes help the visually impaired who access web sites using a screen reader. They can’t see the image, but with a descriptive alt attribute, they will be able to know what your image is.



10. Social Media Optimization

SMO is considered as the part of SEO these days. It actually focuses on driving traffic from sources other than search engines. There are many social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace, Digg, Stumbleupon etc. in which we can submit our web pages and gets a lot of unique visitors. This also includes participation in discussion groups, commenting on other websites, blogging and posting status updates on social networking websites etc.



Do you have any tips and tricks that you would like to add? How has traffic from search engines helped the development and growth of your website? Please leave a comment below, we would love to hear from you.

Online Search - Latest Trends and Innovations

Online market is growing rapidly and it will continue to grow in much more better way. According to Forrester’s report on interactive marketing tactics, the top three areas where marketers feel most potential over the next three years are social media, online video and SEO. Companies will focus more of their marketing budget on SEO. However, trends and techniques in search marketing tend to fluctuate over the years regarding to the fact that search engine market is developing in a very fast pace. It’s been time to watch out these changes and trends in online search for appropriate corporate marketing strategies

Currently, Google still rule the world’s search engine market, following by Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing. After the Microsoft- Yahoo partnership at the beginning of this year, it's now going to be a Two-Engine, 80/20 world. The end users will be the beneficiaries of this highly competitive landscape. What the numbers need to show in the future is not so much the percentage of total searches each engine has but more so the influence of each engine as they compare to all the other ways that people are getting their information these days. So the question is: What is happening out there? 

1. Search engines keep its traffic 

Traditionally search engines wanted to send traffic to the most relevant web pages based on search terms. But today players like Google and Bing are both doing more to make their visitors stickier and get their queries answered without ever having to leave the engine to keep more traffic. Anytime when you “google” the weather forecasts, the currency exchanges, the soccer scores or the travel information, the results are right there on the search page, no need to go anywhere. More of this type of information is expected to be available.

2. Mobile search by location, voices and sights

• Searching by location on mobile shows that the geo craze now has come to search engine on mobile devices. Google optimizes mobile search suggestions based on location to make its its search suggestions on mobile devices even easier.. Now you have the option “Near me now” on Google page in iPhone or Android cell phone to bring up search results close to your immediate location. Let's take a look, comparing the desktop search suggestions to the mobile suggestions.

• Searching by voices, which was launched a year ago, enables millions of users to speak to Google. The combination between voice searching and language translation is expected to spread the search power to a larger base of users and new markets.

• Searching by sights is rather new but expected to gain more notice and increasing usage. Now with only a mobile phone’s camera, you can send your picture to search engines like Google to know what you are seeing. It’s extremely helpful when going travel, exploring new places and studying. It is just so convenient and practical!

3. Search teams up with social media 

Social media has proven itself to be a productive and effective way to get the word out there and it seems like search engines are picking up on it. Social sites within the search engine results pages are here to stay. If brands do not control their Twitter page, they risk losing control of their brand’s message on Twitter and in search. So, search matters in social media marketing. So it’s time to include social media optimization as one of the SEO strategies for SEO companies.

4. Real-time search 

Microsoft and Google are racing on the real-time search integration in a response to the increasing power of social media and networks. Being partnership with leading social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular social sites, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. So basically, the real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand. And, as part of the launch of real-time, Google also added "hot topics" to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. 

5. Personalized search

Personalized search is here to stay. Both Google and Bing have released their "permanent" personalization of results. Search engines are now storing information about what you’re searching for even if you’re not signed in. So basically, personalized search helps you to get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations, and other personalized features

Personalized search does present some new challenges for SEO. It is difficult to explain to clients how personalized search results appear at various positions depending upon who is carrying out the search. So changes in SEO tactics such as providing fresh, relevant, engaging and updated content, making it easy to bookmark but still not overlooking the universal search are necessary.

Six Reasons of Using Google Adwords for Your Advertising Campaign

To compete, you need to be found. Then to be found, you need to say something. But to build sales lead, you need to connect to your targeted customers. So it's all about competition on the internet. And it is undeniable that search engine marketing helps marketers a lot to enhance the performance online. The topic seems outdated but should be reviewed frequently. Anyone who is interested in or curious about online marketing in general or search engine marketing in particulars should understand thoroughly how it works and benefits your organization. Here it comes with 6 reasons for choosing and using Google Adwords, the leading search engine advertiser, for your online campaign:

• Google Adwords can generate qualified sales lead

It is fundamental to any Google Adwords campaign to identify and select relevant and profitable keywords. Popular and obvious keyword may cost more, while keyword combinations or more specific keywords are better for the market niche. Therefore, smart key word selection can increase the qualified the sales lead according to 80/20 rule.

• Google Adwords can reach worldwide and reach targeted customers 

Google's AdWords match up advertisers with content that their target market peruses regularly. It can also reach markets which were previously hard and expensive to access.

• Businesses only pay Google when the ads were clicked

As a pay-per-click advertising form, businesses only pay when their ads work.

• Google Adwords is a very affordable form of advertising

With low entry fee and spending on performance, Google Adwords is very cost-effective in comparison with other traditional advertising channels

• Google Adwords offer opportunities to improve the search engine optimization (SEO). 

Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results. Therefore, it helps to improve quality and popularity of the corporate website.

• Google Adwords is easily to monitor and control.

Google Adwords Service allows advertisers easily monitor the performance of their ads, provides detailed report on their spending and analyzes the effectiveness of the ad campaign.

So that's the point. Hope you enjoy it and welcome discussion!

How to Generate Sales Lead by Google Adwords?

Millions of searches are happening each second. By taking advantage of search engines, companies can enhance their online advertising and sales performance. And Google Adwords offer companies this rare opportunity.

By using this, the company is generating and placing its adverts and paying Google for each click. It's a form of advertising that advertisers make a bid on selected keywords to have adverts showing on prominent position on Google’s search website result page, thus attracting more clicks from searchers. This bid can range from a few cents up to several dollars per click depending on market competition.

More important, as a pay-per-click form of advertising, Google Adwords could help to build qualified sales leads easier, more affordable, and more rapidly as it can also reach markets which were previously hard and expensive to access. However, in order to generate more sales lead, there are three keys for companies to apply in a Google Adwords campaign.

First, a keyword research to find targeted keyword phrases should be applied. It is fundamental to any Google Adwords campaign for identifying and selecting relevant and profitable keywords. Popular and obvious keyword may cost more, while keyword combinations or more specific keywords are better for the market niche. The priority is always targeted sales leads at the lowest possible cost, not just the increasing traffic.

Second, attractive advert copywriting and good landing page optimization is crucial. This will improve the conversion rates and minimize the cost per sales lead.

Last, cost per lead should be minimized. As in fact, most of sales leads are generated by a small percentage of keywords according to 80/20 rule. Therefore, elimination or lowering bid on unprofitable keywords is necessary. Adwords conversion tracking and Google Analytics are powerful tracking tools that help to select smart keyword and make clever bid strategy to minimize the cost per sales lead.

It is similar to other search engines like Yahoo! Search Marketing (Y!SM) and MSN AdCenter (known as Bing now), which offer the same principles and practices.