Search Engine Optimization is one of those things that most people think they can do easily, while this is somewhat true, there are a lot of common mistakes that are made which either hurt you or do absolutely nothing to help your ranking. I’m going to talk a little bit about common misconceptions and mistakes made with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
You Will Not Be “Number One on Google”
You would not believe how often I receive requests from people that “want to be number one on Google”. It’s not going to happen for a couple of reasons. The first being that the number one ranked site on Google – is Google. Good luck getting ahead of them. The second being that I’m fully aware that you don’t mean that you want to be the first ranked site on Google, you want to be the first ranked site under a certain keyword but you don’t know how to articulate that.
Vague search terms are not your friend. You really need to narrow down what search terms users will find you with. I know that I’m not going to be ranked anywhere near the top on the Google search results for the phrase “web design” but if I narrow it down to “Fredericton Web Design” I’m not doing too bad. It’s in your best interest to focus where you want to be found. A broader, more vague search is going to lead to millions of results but if you narrow your focus then you’re going to find it easier to step into the spotlight.
In August when I launched my friend Nick Forret’s photographer site he wasn’t even registering under the most common search term for local photographers; “Fredericton Photographer” but now, 2 months later, Nick has sky rocketed up to the first page and is quickly overtaking established sites. What’s this doing for Nick? Well, it’s increasing his business for one. People are now able to find him.
This leads me to my next point…
Search Engine Optimization Does Not Happen Over Night
No, it doesn’t. It happens more often than not that people pay to have SEO applied to their site and then they call the next day or week and ask why they “aren’t the first result on Google.” Half of the answer to that is above, the other half is simply because it takes a while for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to crawl your site. It takes time for these bots to travel around the internet and read sites. According to Google “[c]rawls are based on many factors such as PageRank, links to a page, and crawling constraints such as the number of parameters in a URL. Any number of factors can affect the crawl frequency of individual sites.”
Expect the time between crawls to be a week to a month for a low traffic website. Sites with much higher traffic with more incoming links get crawled more frequently and thus have their reports updated quicker.
Flooding Your Site With Keywords Does Not Help Your Ranking
Flooding your <title> tag, alt and title attributes, meta description and content with keywords is not going to help you, if anything it’s going to make search engines avoid you like the plague. Using the same keywords over and over again raises flags with search engines and they see it as spam. The best way to avoid this is to read what’s your writing out loud. Have you used the same word 15 times in the span of three sentences? Does what you’re reading sound really awkward to you? If the answer is yes, then you need to cut back on the keywords. Don’t forget, that content isn’t there just for the search engines to read – there are real people that will hopefully be reading the content on your site as well and if you repeat “Fredericton Web Design” 15 times in a paragraph then they’re going to think that you’re a bit of an oaf. So be smart when writing your content and placing keywords.
Meta Keywords Do Not Do Anything Anymore
This doesn’t count as a full item so it only gets half a point. It’s been speculated for years that search engines don’t see much weight in Meta Keywords and just recently Google announce that they don’t even look at them. It’s true, Google said it themselves. Adding them to your site does absolutely jack. You can thank the porn industry and spam sites for that.
I hope this has helped clear up a few misconceptions about search engine optimization. So next time you’re going to talk to your web guy about being the “first on Google” just stop and think for a second and remember what you just learned.
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About Robb
Hi, I'm Robb Clarke - a Fredericton, New Brunswick based Web Designer and Developer. I'm currently working with OrangeSprocket as one of their Front End Developers. Please take a look around my site and give the Blog a read (or the Shorts if you're looking for a shorter read about none industry related stuff) or stop by my Portfolio to see what I've been up to lately. Most importantly - don't be a stranger.