subject: 3 SEO Mistakes That Will butcher Your Traffic [print this page] 3 SEO Mistakes That Will butcher Your Traffic
Have you tried any and everything to get the search engines to give your site a higher ranking? Why aren't you getting ranked higher, then? There exist brand new owners of websites whose attempts at getting increased in the search engine rankings don't work because they don't do what they're required to. Search engines are constantly evolving, along with the optimization methods that help you rank well. If you want to stay ahead of the crowd and see your site on the first page of Google, you need to avoid making the following mistakes. If you work on these, you'll get more positive results, no matter how much money you have.
The most common SEO mistake made by new webmasters is that they try to use a lot of flash on their website. Even though flash gives your website the "coolness" factor, it's not really recommended when you're doing SEO. Many website owners try to make their site more impressive and appealing by adding a flash page, which obviously cannot be read by the search engines and therefore cannot be crawled.
If you want to get seen by the search engine spiders, you must have content on your site as that's what they look for. This will affect your rankings. Flash can really dress up your site and you don't have to get rid of it completely if you just use some graphics along with the text so that the search engines approve. Remember, the more text you have, the better it is.
Don't forget to put the ALT tags in all the images on your site. ALT tags will tell someone what the picture is while it's still loading.
However, if you use ALT tags in your images, you will also get a higher ranking with the search engines. People usually don't remember this about optimizing websites. Therefore, you'll want to create your ALT tags with your keywords in them so that you can describe what your site is about to both readers and the searches.
Avoid shady SEO consultants who indulge into unethical practices. These days it's common to find many SEO companies who are more than willing to be of service. If you find a company that's ethical, work with them, but some companies don't have that kind of ethic and they'll do anything to get ranked. You won't even know what hit your site until you're de-indexed. That is why it's important only to hire that company or those people that work within ethics and also those people that will update you constantly on how your site is doing. The more transparent they are, the better it is. Above all, your SEO should focus on ethics. The webmasters use such techniques really don't know how they're damaging their sites by using such methods. Never needlessly include lots of keywords on your site as search engines will think you're spamming. Also, copying content will put your out of favor with readers as well as search engines. It doesn't matter if you're going to do it yourself or you're going to hire someone to do your SEO for you, only use the most ethical SEO methods.
