Search engine optimisation is often one of the most difficult, but important tools in your online business toolbox. It is important for advertising, marketing and sales of your services or products. There is so much involved, it is rather easy to go wrong. Here are just five of them:
Make Sure You Don’t Under Utilise Your Site – You need to pay attention to every aspect of your website development. Content is not the only thing to worry about. Optimising content is only one piece of the pie. If you don’t leverage all of your site, you are shooting yourself in the foot – don’t just worry about content!
You will get visitors if your content is on-point, but the search engines can rank you even higher if you used keywords in other places too. Remember that the page has a headline, an article can have a title and a picture has an associated caption. Learn to use them all to your advantage.
Overloading Keywords – don’t try and fool the search engines, they are smarter than you think. If you use too many keywords, they will start to ignore your content and automatically give you a lower ranking. It seems like you could use as many as you wanted in an article and that would make you more visible, but it’s not true.
Search engines recognise when people are cheating by overstuffing their articles with keywords. Content that is well written will stay within the allowable keyword density. Always ensure that the keywords flow naturally in the article and don’t appear to be contrived.
Keyword Density – You can have too few keywords as well as too many. Some people actually forget about the key words when writing. You might have written the most informative article about a subject, but without giving the search engines the appropriate clues, they will be unable to rank you and no one will find your work. It’s not sufficient to use the word once or twice in an article.
No Variety – For better optimisation, a website shouldn’t use just one keyword. For example, if your primary keyword is “chocolate,” then your whole website won’t be based on that one word. When people are searching, they use a number of words similar to your primary keyword, or in combination. Diversify, for example by using the words “chocolate treat,” “how to make chocolate,” and so on and by not being too specific, such diversity will pay dividends.
Use Reciprocal Links – Back links are important, but they are not all created equal. The search engines prefer organic links. You want others to link to you because they like your product and what your website presents to others. So if you use top quality content, article directories and social bookmarking websites can give high class, inbound links to help with ranking.
Start out on solid footing with professional seo services. Don’t get involved with first-timer mistakes!
Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an accomplished Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps companies of all sizes reach their commercial targets. Want to get more information about online business building success strategies that really work? Contact VMF today!
