subject: Tips to start focusing on getting your site to rank high in Google [print this page] Tips to start focusing on getting your site to rank high in Google
Google is a name that almost everyone in the world knows and they should, as the world's most widely used search engine. Many people throw up a website for different reasons and believe that is the end of it. The Internet is growing at warp speeds and organizing it is a big deal.
The very resources (Google, yahoo, and Bing) that we use to search the web are also the companies that are responsible for keeping thing nice and neat, and easily accessible. If you want people to find your site and visit it, then you should put in the effort to optimize it the right way. There are many advantages of search engine optimization or SEO, but the biggest one is you keep getting consistent traffic for free.
Unfortunately, SEO is one of the fields where there is too much bad advice going around for someone who doesn't know any better to be able to tell the difference. Following are three of the most common mistakes that can cause your site the most harm.
When people first start with a website, they often try SEO by using words that don't specify anything. Keywords are necessary for SEO purposes, but if you just cram them into your text, the search engines won't like this and they'll give you a penalty because they'll think you are spam. This will cause your website to decline in the rankings and that also means you will achieve fewer visitors to your site. Your visitors won't like it as they only want sites that are understandable and offer the help they need.
If you don't perform your keyword research correctly then your entire campaign will be worthless. Basically, with the wrong list of keywords, no matter how great you are ranking, you won't make any money. Without targeted traffic you won't make any sales. If you base your web pages on phrases that people aren't searching for then your site will never be found by anyone. With the right keywords you are off to a running start; with the wrong keywords you might as well start over because you won't win the race. The key is to locate lower competition keywords and to build your content around them. And the best part is that there are free keyword tools that will show you keywords that you can 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. When a person launches a website, he/she reads that creating thousands of links will get you on the first page of Google. These spam tactics do not work anymore. If you do get lots of incoming links to a new site, Google will simply place the site in the Google Sandbox for a few months, and de-index it from the search engine index. For the best results, you have to build links in a natural way; the same way that you will get them if you weren't adding them yourself.
Search engine optimization can bring more free traffic to your site than you have ever dreamed possible. SEO requires you to stay consistent and persistent; do this and you will beat the competition. Just a little patience, that's all. There is no magic SEO button it's all about the fundamentals, stick with them and I guarantee that your site will stick around longer than the people who only take shortcuts.
