Thursday, May 6, 2010

SEO Trends And Mistakes One Must Avoid

Search Engine Optimization or simply known as SEO is one of the most popular type of Internet marketing used in the market today.Search Engine Optimization, or SEO can get us massive amounts of traffic to our websites. But when used wrongly, it has the ability to draw traffic away from our websites instead.This article summarizes SEO trends and mistakes you should avoid from practicing

They key to understanding which Search Engine Optimization mistakes to avoid lies in understanding what big search engines like Google likes and does not like.

Image headers and extensive image use. 
Google spiders cannot read images like text. Therefore, your header cannot be quantified by Google's search engine and as we all know headers are extremely important for SEO. Therefore, use a text header with the "[h1]" tag instead. If you must use images, include keywords in the alt text. 

Excessive keywords 
If the keyword density of your site is over 5%, your site will come across as spam and that will have negative effects on SEO. Instead, use stemmed keywords. (key phrases related to your targeted keyword)

E.g. internet marketing tips and online marketing advice.  

Profanity or Bad Language
Google hates profanity and bad language. Therefore, stay away from it, unless you are running an adult website.

Splash pages 
Probably the biggest mistake anyone can make is by having a splash page. The first thing Google reads is your main page and if your main page is one big hunk of flash videos, you will be losing out on tons of potential free traffic.

Black hat SEO 
Black hat SEO techniques,  involves the use of deception. Black hat SEO is also known in industry as spamdexing. One popular example spamdexing or black hat SEO is hidding text behind images or colored similar to its background. According to many professionals, black hat SEO can give faster results compared to that of white hat. However, these results are usually temporary, and that if caught, websites would be penalized or banned from a search engine.  

Google search engine is always upgrading their algorithm to prevent from SEO abusers and thus, it is always good to stay on top of the SEO trends so that your site will not lose traffic. 

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