10 biggest SEO mistakes
Thursday, 17 April 2008
Last Updated: Monday, 21 April 2008
By Chris Thomas
Google AdWords is losing its power as ads get more expensive. Search engine optimisation, which aims to get better natural search rankings, can be a more reliable strategy. But watch out because there are traps.
The beauty of Google AdWords is its ability to put your brand and your offering in front of an audience right at the instant they’re interested in it – the consumer enters in a query and up pops your ad.
But you have to bid to get your ad up the top of the page; and competition is driving up the costs. As more people have discovered AdWords, competition for top positions has increased, and the cost of each click has increased.
On top of this, Google is adding new rules and features to AdWords almost weekly, so trying to keep up with Google AdWords is becoming a full-time occupation.
There is another way.
A great natural search engine ranking at Google will achieve the same result. The great aspect of search engine optimisation (SEO) is the ability for you to DIY. If you have the time and the inclination to learn about it, there’s nothing to stop you doing it yourself.
Ultimately, this can save you a bundle on ongoing AdWords costs, because once you’re ranking well, you can wind back your AdWords spend and rely on free organic traffic from the search engines.
But it does take time and patience, so be prepared for results to happen gradually.
Think of it this way: Google AdWords = one day cricket. SEO = a test match.
The fundamentals of ethical search engine optimisation need to be followed if you want long term success. Don’t be tempted by the “dark side”, commonly referred to as Black Hat SEO. Keep it clean, play by the search engine rules, be patient and you will succeed.
So here is a top 10 list of the mistakes people make, and what you need to be aware of to avoid them.
1. Little or no idea how a search engine actually works
You simply must understand how a search engine works so you know what to do to work with one! Search engines, like Google, work automatically.
There is no human influence on Google’s results at all (except when a website has been naughty, and is physically removed from Google results).
Search engines are typically made up of three parts – robots, crawlers and spiders; or “bots”.
Robots are essentially automated information collectors. Like humans, they “surf” the internet, following links, finding web pages and sending information back to a central storage computer (the index – see below).
It’s important to ensure that robots have full access to your website and there are no technical issues preventing robots from crawling (accessing) all pages of your website. For instance, robots are unable to follow JavaScript navigation systems, whereas humans can.
The index
The index is an enormous storage system which stores and continuously updates all the information the robots have collected. The index is simply a slightly outdated “copy” of the internet. In SEO terms, it’s important to ensure all pages of your website are included in the index.
The algorithm
The algorithm is the third part of a search engine. This is a program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant. Each search engine’s algorithm is slightly different in the way it works, which is why results for the same key phrase at different search engines will often provide a different set of results.
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