Saturday, June 28, 2008

Don't Let Online Superstition Keep You Down

By Robert Gantt

Superstition: Just putting keywords in the keyword meta tag will get the page good ranking when that keyword is searched.

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: You can get your page ranked higher with hidden links or text in a page .

Fact: Keyword stuffing, as it's sometimes called, and/or hidden links in the page can get your website banned or penalized if uncovered. Many search engines consider it spamming. In the early days of search engine advertising it was effective but it's time has past.

Superstition: The more reciprocal links you have to other websites, the better your Google page ranking will be.

Fact: Not necessarily so. If you are linked with some pages, such as FFA pages and link farms, his can make your ranking lower, not higher. What you should try to have is inbound links from sites which have quality content relevant to your site. While no one is exactly sure how Google calculates this, relevant links seem to be given far more weight.

Superstition: Most sites are already optimized. Does this even give me a chance?

Fact: According to some studies 60% of all websites aren't optimized correctly to rank high in the major search engines. Because of the very nature and volatility of search engine algorithms only a small percentage of web designers optimize the pages they build for their clients. When getting your website built make sure you discuss optimization with your web designer and find out exactly what services are included in your project.

Superstition: The more times you repeat the keyword in the page, the higher it will rank.

Fact: Search engines use their own standards to decide which pages will rank well. Keyword density is important and we all know this but what we don't know is what the target keyword density is for SEO. Some say 3%, others 6%; no one knows with any certainty, other than that too many or too few keywords will get your page penalized in the rankings.

Superstition: Once your site has been indexed, your ranking won't be affected by changes you make to your site.

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: You don't need a robots.txt file or a sitemap.

Fact: Search engine bots look for the robots.txt and your sitemap as soon as they get to your site. These files tell the bots what to look at on your site and any link in your sitemap will be crawled. You should definitely have both of these files; they should be placed into the root directory of your domain these files can be a big help in getting a better page ranking.

Superstition: Search engines cannot index pages with Flash and using Flash in your page will lower it's ranking.

Fact: Search engines cannot index a Flash movie itself, but, if you specify Flash text (in the HTML) used in the movie, the text in the movie along with the rest of the page HTML will be indexed. Flash does nothing to keep the page from being properly indexed, nor does it keep your page from being crawled. Search engines don't like pages that re-direct, including Flash pages that do it automatically. It's the auto-redirect, not the Flash file that keeps a splash page from being ranked.

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