SEO Mistake #5: Obsessing Over Meta Tags
"Meta tags are so 1995."
Even so, you’ll still find a few web designers, programmers and unscrupulous SEO “professionals” who’ll insist that, in order to optimize your site for the search engines, all you need to do is fill your keyword and description meta tags with all your relevant keywords (and then some) – and keep an eye on your PageRank.
If you’re new to this search engine optimization business, you probably have no idea what a meta tag or PageRank is. Here are a couple of definitions, just for you:
Meta Tag: These are tags placed in the head of your HTML pages that give the visitor’s browser, or the search engine spider, information about the page. Two mid-90s search engines, Infoseek (now defunct) and AltaVista (now owned by Yahoo!), first popularized the keywords tag, which they used to determine what each page on a website was about.
However, by 1997, search engines realized that spammers were misusing the tag to make pages rank for terms that were completely irrelevant to the page’s content. Search engines completely stopped giving so much weight to the keyword meta tag information by 2002.
That said, the description tag is still important. It does not affect how your page is ranked, or what keyword phrases your page will appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for, but the meta description tag is displayed under your page’s title in some of the SERPs.
We'll cover page rank in the next article. In the meantime, stop on by the new Volition website and get a jump with your own personalized site review.
SEO Mistake #4: Submitting Your Site to Search Engines
Chances are, if you’ve been a member of an online business or SEO related forum for long, you’ll have witnessed a heated discussion about whether or not you should submit your site to the search engines. If you’re really new to having your own website, you might not have a clue what this means.
Submitting your site to a search engine is a process in which you go to the search engine’s website and fill out a form, telling the search engine what the address is to your website and what keywords are relevant to it.
Sounds simple, fast and harmless, right? That’s exactly what proponents of submitting will tell you.
“Submitting doesn’t hurt anything.”
“It’s best to make sure you’re covering all your bases.”
Unfortunately, some new website owners, desperate for traffic and motivated by spammy services that promise to submit the new site to thousands of search engines, or hundreds of directories, buy into this idea and find themselves separated from hundreds of dollars with no real return on investment.
Why?
The Truth about Search Engines
First, there are only four search engines. Any other site that calls itself a search engine these days simply returns results from one of the big four – Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing. Submitting your site to any other “search engine” is a waste of time.
Second, search engines use programs called robots or spiders to crawl the web. This means that the spiders follow links from one web page to another and from one website to another. And when the spider encounters new content, a new page or a new site, it indexes the information. In other words, it sends the new content and its location back to the search engine.
Then, when someone searches a keyword phrase on the search engine’s site or in their browser toolbar, the visitor is given a list of relevant results on the search engine results page (SERP).
Once your website is known to be trustworthy and has aged a bit, your pages will appear in the SERPs for relevant keyword phrases. This happens even if you never submit your site to a search engine. And submitting will not speed up the process.
Impact on Your Business
So what does this mean for you, the small business owner who just wants to earn a living?
This means:
- Don’t waste your time or money submitting your site to search engines.
- Focus your efforts on developing quality content for your site and for other people’s sites. Call it search engine food.
- Work on developing relationships with the owners of high ranking websites in your industry or relevant industries. A website owner who knows, likes and trusts you is more likely to link to you in the content of his website.
- Make sure you’re meeting your customers’ needs first.
- Never do anything for SEO purposes alone.
Keep these five guidelines in mind when making changes or additions to your site or building your new site.
Stay tuned for next week's SEO article. Or, stop by the new website of Volition and get your own personalized site review and SEO quote.
SEO Mistake #3: Spreading Your Content Over Multiple Domains
Domain names are practically a dime a dozen these days. And who doesn’t know someone who has at least that many in their portfolio? Purchasing a new domain is as easy as hopping out of bed at 3 a.m., doing a quick search to see if it’s available and whipping out your credit card.
Setting up a new site to go along with your shiny new domain name can be just as quick and easy with some of the site builder tools and blog tools out there. And Viola! There’s a shiny new WordPress site ready to go.
It’s so easy to do, and there are so many reasons that make setting up a new domain name sound good. But from an SEO perspective, is it really the smart thing to do?
When You Should Use a New Domain Name ws Sub-Domain
Sometimes it does make sense to use a new domain name or to setup a sub-domain. (For those who don’t know, a sub-domain is a part of a larger domain and the subdomain name is added before the top-level domain with a period, e.g. subdomain.topleveldomain.com.)
If you’re selling a single product, such as an e-book, and you have an army of affiliates that will want to send their customers to a single domain and sales letter page that has nothing but the product to purchase on it, then multiple domains may be a good idea.
Or, if you’re company provides information on multiple, unrelated topics, you may want to setup a website for each topic. For example, if you have an online store and a place where you talk about and support the brand you sell, would benefit from separate domain names (like a store.topleveldomain.com and a support.topleveldomain.com).
Using a sub-domain makes sense if you’re setting up a monstrous website like About.com with multiple content categories that need to be completely separate from one another – but still under the same domain name. Sub-domains are also useful if your company offers several completely different products. For example, Google uses sub-domains in this manner: maps.google.com, news.google.com, mail.google.com.
When You Should NOT Use Multiple Domain Names or Sub-Domains
That said; you need to make sure your customers or visitors can navigate your site easily and that you consider the impact of a separate domain or sub-domain on your SEO efforts before you start building.
The first question you need to ask yourself before you start building is why you need more than one domain name or sub-domain.
If your reasoning is so that you can take over the search engine results pages (SERPs) with several websites, go back to the drawing board.
This is a bad idea from an SEO standpoint because the search engines frown upon the practice of having multiple sites with essentially the same content. Anytime you’re attempting to deceive the search engines, you’re walking on thin ice with your site’s credibility in the eyes of the search engines.
That’s just the SEO perspective. Unless you have an army of website updaters and content writers, keeping each of your sites fresh and meeting the needs of your visitors is going to be nearly impossible.
It’s best to keep similar content, or content that targets the same market, on one site and in one sub-domain. Think long and hard about what impact you’ll have and what your motives are before you branch out.
Stay tuned for next week's SEO article. Or, stop by the new website of Volition and get a jump with your own personalized site review.
SEO Mistake #1: Hiring SEO Companies that Spam You
I'm often asked what is the biggest mistake first-timers make when they decide to use SEO techniques to optimize their website.
Hiring a company you found out about through a spammy (ie; questionable) manner
The very first tip off that this might be a bad idea? If they had to market their OWN company and risk their OWN business reputation to get clients, how do you think they will market YOUR website? Yeah, prepare to be blacklisted from the search engines for spamming, or worse.
Finding your way through the labyrinth of conflicting search engine optimization information can be confusing and frustrating, no matter how much experience you have. So when you suddenly receive an email in your inbox promising guaranteed results… you’re tempted.
Don’t give in.
First, these emails almost always offer a scam – a way of manipulating the search engine results that either doesn’t work, or can get you blacklisted from the search engines even if the method does work.
Definition of Blacklisted: Denial of access. Getting your website either banned or boycotted in the search engines. Shut out.
For example, the company may promise to submit your site to 1,000 search engines or 500 directories. Sounds good, right?
Scam: Submitting your site to thousands of search engines
The trouble is that there are only four true search engines in existence: Google, Yahoo, ASK and BING (formerly MSN/Live). Every other search site you use pulls their results from the four mentioned above. So, if your site appears in one of the four, it will appear in the search engine results pages, known as SERPs, on any other search engine site.
Scam: Submitting your site to dozens of directories
As for the 500 directories – do your homework. The only directories that are going to do you any good are those that are related to your industry and are doing decently well themselves. So if you’re selling handcrafted wooden toys, a wedding directory is not going to help you any. However, a directory of American made toys would be perfect. Or a directory of natural, non-toxic toys may drive actual customers to your site.
You may think that having your site listed in unrelated directories will help your site, after all, what’s one more link going to hurt, right?
The trouble with that thinking is, if you have three high-quality sites linking to you and all other links are spammy, unrelated directories, those links will actually reflect poorly on your site. It’s better to focus on receiving high-quality links from sites that rank well in the search engines and have actual visitors who are interested in what you have to offer.
Scam: Promising the moon
Unscrupulous SEO companies also tend to promise you #1 ranking in a particular search engine for certain keywords. The problem is that the SEO companies cannot control the results that appear in the search engines. What they do to make it appear that you’re getting results is use black hat methods to artificially affect your rankings. This is temporary, at best, because the techniques they use violate search engine terms of service, putting you at risk for getting your website banned from the search engines.
Techniques that are a violation of search engine TOS include:
- Keyword stuffing
- Hidden text and links
- Doorway and cloaked pages
- Link farming
- Blog comment spam
Avoid these techniques, and any SEO scam a company sends you in a spam email and you’ll have more resources to spend on techniques that actually work.
Finally, keep this in mind: Emails that try to sell you something, that are sent in bulk from a company you don’t have any kind of relationship with, is spam and it’s against the law. The last company you want fiddling around with your online pride and joy is one that is willing to break the law to get your attention.
In spite of what the spam says, when you’re optimizing your website steady and slow is the way to go. NEVER do business with a company or person who spams you.
So, who should you hire for your SEO needs then? Stay tuned for next week's article about how to find a reliable organic search engine optimization company. Or, take a look at the new face of Volition and consider us for your SEO needs.
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