SEO Tips to Avoid Critical Mistakes
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This article outlines three tips to help the budding web site marketing guru avoid some of the horrific and damaging SEO mistakes made by so many web designers. If care is taken to develop a good SEO plan at the outset, much pain is saved later.
A bad SEO plan can result in expensive redesigning and at the worst end, scrapping the site altogether. There are great methods for optimizing web sites for search engines and there are also really bad ones.
Before delving into the subject, there is a tool called Web CEO which is a free download. It is absolutely great at helping the designer optimize any site for SEO purposes. It can be seen at http://www.webceo.com/.
Tip 1: Write Effective Content
There is nothing worse for a web site than badly written or poorly researched content. Content must be useful for the web site's target audience or they will simply go elsewhere, never to return. It must be relevant to the subject matter covered by the site. That does not mean just advertising products and services. The site should contain articles related to the site theme.
Content needs to be keyword-targeted, with keywords used by web surfers to find the information on the site using search engines. The search engine optimized content makes the difference between those who find the site and those who go elsewhere. Of course, there are other marketing methods for bringing traffic to a site, but by optimizing the keywords, targeted traffic from search engines is much more likely.
Web sites that employ well-written keyword targeted content will also be crawled effectively by the search engines. For example, a site selling mobile phones could host articles on the latest mobile technologies and brand reviews. It is no longer necessary to submit site addresses to Yahoo or Google. Given time, not too long either, the search engines will find the site quite easily by crawling using search algorithms.
Maintain the balance between graphics and content. Ensure that there is not an overload of graphical imagery splattered across the pages even if it is an artistically driven site like a gallery. The content and its ability to grab the interest of the visitor must be paramount. The quality of the content is what is required for optimized results on the web. This does not entail refusing to use graphics altogether. It simply means that a balance between content and graphics should be applied to avoid badly cluttered pages. Ensure that the images have <alt> attributes with relevant text inserted. For example, if it is a site showing pictures of computers for a vendor, the <alt> tag text could be "Brand new PCs at low prices." This in turn will further aid search engine page rankings.
Next: Tip 2: Keyword Density >>
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