Thursday, May 22, 2008

Do’s and Don’ts of search engine marketing

Here are some things to avoid if you are to boost your search engine marketing. Let’s start with your text. Your text should be relevant to your page. On frames. In an article about your website being search engine friendly, theydiscouraged the use of frames. Why? Search engines find it difficult to go past them. Your prospects then wouldn’t find you because the one who’s supposed to uncover wasn’t able to do just that. Be an original. Don’t be justa replica of a site that impressed you. Next graphics. Searchers are on the look out for information and a website that will give them just that. Besides being unfriendly to the search engine, it can also slow down speed of your connection.Have you ever been to a site where you were redirected to get the information you need, and Justas you click that be redirected again to yet another page? Didn’t that just tick you off? Minimize your redirecting. It can kill your ranking because the search engine my not see the connection between your pages due to the redsirect code’s blocking of their path.A lengthy URL can also be a culprit. Not only is it difficult to remember, but it also could be applicable to other database. Thus, the searcher may be led to somewhere else (not to mention that site whose url is contained within your url)Once upon a time the search engines purpose was primarily to serve the searcher. They were geared towards capturing as much of the web into their database so that they can provide quick and relevant results. Later on however, there came website owners who found a way around the system of being searched quickly by being "search engine friendly". That became the beginning of search engine optimization and the like. Today, despite this strategy, the old school is still the most reliable source of information. Just like any other shortcuts, search engine optimization alone wouldn’t stand the test of time….in this case, the searchers and the search engine (for getting caught spamming).How important is meta tag? A meta tag is the title of your web page. What it is, how it is written and it’s length will tell the searcher about your web page even before they visit it. So how exactly do you come up with your meta tags?If there were a lot of sites relevant to a particular search, are they the ones that stand out ? are your keywords and phrases connected at all to your site’s content? Or is it substantial to what your site stands for? Is it brief and concise?Last piece of advise. Although links can lead to higher chances of being spidered, they are not that appealing to searchers, in this case…humans. After all, if you get too much of these linking, you can also be penalized by search engines when you are labeled a link spammer. Moderation in everything is still the way to go. Make your site a balance of being search engine and searcher (human) friendly.

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