subject: Three SEO Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Success [print this page] Three SEO Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Success
Finding ways to entice traffic to your site regularly is a primary element for the success of any online business. It's relatively easy to learn to optimize your site in order to receive this kind of traffic directly from search engines. Unfortunately there are some Internet marketers who make a point of working on ways to fool the search engines instead of using proven optimization tactics. Then these marketers are surprised when their sites suddenly get banned by the big search engines, like Google or Yahoo! Some webmasters aren't aware that the things they're doing could get them into so much strife with search engines. Both of these cases could be put down to a lack of knowledge about how search engines really work and what they look for. If you hope to succeed with proper SEO tactics, you'll need to know which ones to avoid. Let's look at some of the more major SEO mistakes you should try to avoid.
Graphics and images are a good way to give your site instant appeal, but be careful about putting too many on your site or you'll be damaging your SEO efforts. Having a high number of images on your website will leave less room for search engine friendly content, which will lead to a lower ranking. If your text appears within images, it's going to reduce the impact plain text on your site can have. Search engines aren't able to read images, so if your navigation links to other pages in your site are written on images, they're useless for SEO purposes. If you do decide to use some images, keep in mind that putting your site's keywords in the image's ALT tag can help you. These tags can be read by the search engines, which can help your rankings somewhat. You should never commit the blunder of taking text that's not yours from various other sites, as that's not morally correct. If you just copied content from someone else, it's not going to do you a bit of good. Your plagiarized content might not be noticed by a few but eventually people will come to know. The major reason it's not good to do this is because search engines are extremely smart nowadays and they can tell when you've used content that's been duplicated. There's a filter that's saved for duplicated content and if your website gets trapped in there, it won't do a thing for your site's ranking. This is the main reason why it's crucial for search engines as well as visitors to like the content that you use.
Now, probably the most important part of effective SEO is getting incoming links but get too many at once because your site will be penalized for spamming. For your own good, don't fall victim to the link building services that will mass spam your new site's link and get you thousands of incoming links. Don't be fooled, the search engines know better than to fall for such a silly trick. Do your SEO the right way from the beginning because Google is very strict on new sites and will sandbox you for the littlest misstep, like spamming your link on other people's sites. So if you don't want your site to disappear from the search engines, build links naturally but consistently. So, you should never be unethical with your SEO. Don't be one of those webmasters who isn't aware of the damage done to your site by using unethical methods. Keyword stuffing is highly looked down upon and will label your site as a spammer. It's also important never to use content you've copied from other sites or else you will lose traffic and the search engines will drop you in the ranks. So whether you're hiring an SEO consultant or doing it yourself, make sure you indulge in the best SEO practices.
