Seo Tips

By Vincent Newton (c) 2010

Using SEO properly can be a tricky thing but if you are niche marketing you have to do it expertly or a great deal of time and money can easily be wasted. Even the experts, people who have been doing it for years, make some common mistakes though, so understanding what these mistakes are should be a task for everyone using this technology. The following are some of the more common mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Pick your keywords carefully. Keywords are the essence of any search. The problem is that what you may think of as the perfect keyword would never occur to most other people. The trick here is two-fold. First, do a several searches yourself with each keyword and check the number of results. The more results the more chance that word is used more than the other. Second, use more than one keyword. If you have a vitamin and health food site, you might want to try vitamins, health and health food. It is not good to saturate your content with keywords but using several different keywords can raise your rankings.

2. Leave your users options. Why would you leave the search engine only one way to display? Many sites are using flash now and it really does spice up the site. Search engines don’t necessarily like flash though and neither do some users. Providing an HTML alternative is very necessary if raw numbers of visitors are what you are looking for. If the search engines spider can´t read the flash, it can´t index it and you are left out. Make sure to leave the search engine as many alternatives as you possibly can.

3. Limit your Java Scripting. If you are at all familiar with Java and JavaScript, you will know how effective they are with navigation. The problem is that many search engines cannot read JavaScript and will pass on it. If you must use JavaScript, think about adding a site map or setting your links in a noscript tag so that your site is crawlable, it can be navigated without JavaScript tags.

4. Forget Meta tags. They are and have been for a while a thing of the past. The easiest way to solve the Meta problems that can crop up here is to create your Meta keywords together with the description to make it easier. You will find that they rank much better like this and making them match is a much smoother process.

5. Sites are much like living organisms in that you have to feed and maintain them. Let your client know up front that the site will need continuous maintenance to be successful. It must be optimized regularly, with an eye to what your competition is doing in the market. Operating a website like this will keep you current with the ever changing algorithms of the different search engines.

Keeping your website both fresh and dynamic, current with the times is vital. This requires knowing what the new trends are in both marketing in your niche and movements within the SEO community.