Website Optimization Tips: Common Mistakes

Over the past few weeks there have been lots of discussions in the forums regarding proper website creation and some of the issues every webmaster should be concerned about. We are always eager to get our website online as fast as possible, and of course we want to generate as much traffic as we can. In doing so, we sometimes take shortcuts that seem perfectly reasonable at the time… but in the long run, these shortcuts can do more harm than good. While this is not a complete list of all the common mistakes, these are definitely the top ones we should all be considering when developing a website.

Mirror Sites:

What is a mirror? The term “mirror” refers to an identical website hosted on another domain / website address. Large websites often provide mirror sites in different continents so their users can download from a closer server in hopes of achieving faster download speeds. While this is a perfectly legitimate practice, many search engines consider it “spam” because the number of pages is doubled, yet the content is identical. Most search engines use “Duplicate Content Filters” which can prevent mirror sites from distorting the search engine results pages. Unfortunately, in some cases one or all mirrors may be removed from the index of a search engine without any prior notice.

Multiple Title Tags:

Given that search engines place a great degree of emphasis on the tags. A well-constructed page should contain ONLY one tags and have been known to ban websites which employ such spamming methods!

Cloaking:

Cloaking is the practice of delivering keyword-enriched content to the search engine spiders, while providing different content to the actual website visitors. The rationale behind this approach is to deliver “optimized” content to search engines while delivering regular, un-optimized content to surfers / visitors. An example of this would be a website that has chosen to use Flash media, yet does not wish to suffer the lack of content from a spiders perspective (given that search engines cannot read Flash media)… so they choose to deliver the Flash media to their human visitors, while the spiders see a different page full of text and keywords. While this sounds like a logical and worthwhile approach, it is considered “spam” because the search engine is being “fooled” by being shown content which will never been seen by human users. Most search engines have devised methods to detect cloaking, and many search engines have implemented a “Zero Tolerance” approach to such activity. Google, Lycos, and Hotbot are among the many engines that will either ban a website entirely from their index, or drastically reduce the rankings of any website found to be engaging is such spamming practices.

For these reasons, I highly recommend that you refrain from cloaking your website in any form. Properly optimized content is a much more effective long term approach to better rankings!!

Keyword Stuffing:

“Keyword Stuffing” is the practice of inserting blocks of keywords in the webpage text, for the sole purpose of increasing search engines rankings. Stuffed keywords are generally of poor grammatical structure, and would make little or no sense to human visitors. Given that search engines rank websites based on the text contained in the website pages, the theory behind stuffed keywords is that the density for targeted keywords will increase. While using stuffed keywords will indeed increase the density for the targeted keywords, this practice is also considered spamming by search engines. Stuffed keywords are sometimes disguised as “hidden text” (see below).

Can Stuffing Be Detected? Search engines can easily detect keyword stuffing and most search engines will place a complete ban on the offending website. Given that our goal is to increase your rankings, rather than getting you banned, we encourage you to refrain from using stuffed keywords!

Here is an example of keyword stuffing:

keyword keyword keyword2 keyword3 keyword
keyword keyword keyword2 keyword3 keyword
keyword keyword keyword2 keyword3 keyword
keyword keyword keyword2 keyword3 keyword

Hidden Keywords:

One of the most common instances of spam on websites is the use of “hidden text”, which is also referred to as “invisible text”. Hidden text is text which cannot be seen by regular human visitors, but can be seen by robots and spiders. The theory behind hidden text is that search engines will index the text, even though they are invisible to human readers, thus making the page more keyword dense. There are two forms of hidden text, through regular HTML and through CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Hidden keywords in regular HTML can be achieved by specifying a font color for a block of text (which is usually ’stuffed’ with keywords) which is the same as the background color, thereby making it seem to “disappear” into the background. This form of invisible text is easily detectable by search engines. Hidden text though CSS is more complicated in that the color of the text is defined in an external file, which is not crawlable by search engines.

While almost all forms of hidden text will produce good results in the SHORT term, all major engines have implemented filters which are capable of detecting this type of spam. Websites found to be using hidden text will almost certainly be permanently removed from the index of all search engines. For this reason we encourage you to refrain from using hidden text on any of your web pages.

Flash Content:

Flash movies are a popular way to make websites more compelling. They are useful if you want to impress your visitors, and especially if you offer web design services. Unfortunately, if you use Flash movies, or if you design your complete web site based on Flash technology, your odds of getting listed in the search engines are greatly reduced. Search engines can only “see” pure text. They are not able to recognize text that is contained in an image file, or text that appears as a graphic within a Flash movie. Google includes the following advice in their webmaster guidelines: “If fancy features such as Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.”

The following tips can help in getting your Flash content indexed by the search engines:

Provide links to alternate pages that contain a lot of text and some keywords that the search engines can index,
Place some text above and below your Flash movie which contains your keywords. Along with your title and meta tags, this gives the search engines some text content to index,
If you embed the Flash movie in your HTML code, use your most important keywords in the movie filename, using the HTML tags and ,
You can use the attribute to include some text that will be displayed while the Flash movie is being loaded. In addition, you can use the attribute to include a keyword-rich movie title,
Use the tag to provide text for web browsers which don’t support the Flash plug-in. Use it to describe the contents of the Flash movie so the search engines can index that description,
Link to your Flash page from other pages of your web site, using keyword-rich link texts.
Hopefully, by pointing out a few of these more common mistakes in Website Optimization, we can help you to avoid some problems in the future. Search engines are changing their methodology all the time, so adapting to the ever changing list is a must.

Choosing your Keywords

“Better to be a big fish in a small pond, than to be a small fish in a big pond.”That proverb can be especially true in the “big pond” that is the Internet, and more specifically, in regard to search engines on the Internet.

When choosing your keywords, knowing how to limit your competition is essential. Time and time again, I see people construct their keywords using just one common word, such as “Bike”, and then they question why they aren’t getting ranked highly in the various search engines.

When you choose common words such as “Bike”, you are typically giving yourself a great amount of unnecessary competition.

For instance, at the time this article was written, a search on Google for “Bike” returned over 10 million results. Trying to get a high ranking with a search term as broad as that is indeed achievable, but why burden yourself by competing with 10 million other results when you could avoid it?

What I also find common is that a site will try to target a search term such as “Bike” while they really don’t need to, because their site is related to something much more specific, such as “Bike Safety Equipment”. The search term “Bike Safety Equipment” at the time of this article was written returned around 400,000 Google results. 400,000 results is still a lot of competition, but obviously far less than 10 million. In the case of your own search terms, the difference could be significantly more dramatic.

The point being, if your web site is related to something specific, try targeting that specific keyword search term, instead of opening yourself up to a ton of competition by being too broad. The more specific you are, and the less competition you have, the easier it will be for you to get a higher ranking for your search terms.

Searches vs. Results:

One technique you can use to find an excellent keyword search term is to determine how many searches there have been for a given keyword, and compare that to how many search engine results there are for that keyword.

One way of doing this is to use a tool such as the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. Enter your desired keyword search term, and the tool will tell you the number of people that have searched for it during the last month. Note that the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool only shows the statistics from their database, so these results should only be used as an estimate.

For example, according to the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool, the word “Bicycle” was searched for 111,000 times during a given month in Overture, and returns over 4.5 million results in Google. Alternately, the phrase “Bicycle Tour” was searched for 120,000 times during that same month in Overture, and returns over 1.4 million results in Google. What this example shows is that the keyword search term “Bicycle Tour” was searched for more often than “Bicycle”, yet has less than one-third of the results.

If you targeted the keyword search term “Bicycle” you would have fewer people searching for your keyword, while also having three times the competition.

Using these same techniques in regards to your web site, you can determine which search terms have the stiffest competition and which search terms are, in a sense, “untapped”.

Localizing your Keywords:

If your website offers products and/or services locally, you can take advantage of that fact and optimize accordingly.

For the following examples, lets use a made-up web site for a store called “Eddie’s Mountain Bikes”, which sells mountain bikes in Dallas, Texas.

When choosing a keyword search term for this site, the first keyword that probably comes to mind would be “Mountain Bike”, and clearly that phrase should be plentiful in your web site. We shouldn’t stop there, but let’s say we did, and we target “Mountain Bike” as our primary keyword search term for this site.

First, let’s find out what our competition looks like. At the time of this writing, the keyword “Mountain Bike” returned over 2,000,000 results, which is a lot of competition.

Second, let’s say that we do end up getting in the top 10 results for “Mountain Bike” on Google. Now, what are the chances that the people who were looking to buy a mountain bike are going to be in the Dallas area? At the time of this article, there were around 300 million people in the United States and just over 3 million in Dallas. So in theory, you’ve got a 1 in 100 probability that the person who just found your site is from the Dallas area.

Instead of being so broad and only using “Mountain Bike”, what if we became more specific? Let’s use the keyword search term “Mountain Bike Dallas”. By making that change, we have now dropped from 2,000,000 results to just over 50,000 results. Also, anyone searching for “Mountain Bike Dallas” is most likely to be from the Dallas area. You could also include other surrounding areas in your keyword search terms.

Also, take note that you haven’t taken yourself out of the running for the keyword search term “Mountain Bike”, because that is still part of “Mountain Bike Dallas”. So you can be ranked high in both search terms. But if you had only targeted “Mountain Bike” with no mention of Dallas, you wouldn’t be a contender for the Dallas market any longer.

Things to avoid:

When becoming more specific in your keyword search terms, you do want to avoid becoming too specific. For example, in the case of the Eddie’s Mountain Bikes web site, you wouldn’t want to get as specific as “Mountain Bike Dallas Maple Street” because that is not going to be searched for very often, if ever. I’d suggest finding a good middle ground, somewhere between a really broad search term such as “Bike”, and an overly specific one such as “Mountain Bike Dallas Maple Street”.

Make sure you are optimizing your web site for what it is really about. You may find a good keyword search term that has minimal competition, but don’t be tempted to use it just because of that. Visitors are good, but only if they find what they are looking for on your site.

If your site offers products and/or services locally as well as nationally or internationally, make sure you optimize your web site for all of them. The area you want to target more particularly should be what you focus on, but make certain that your visitors will be able to easily determine that you sell products and/or services nationally or internationally. It would be great to optimize your site locally and increase sales and traffic, but not at the expense of eliminating your other target audiences.

If you are optimizing for a site that would use an extremely broad search term such as “Games”, then the above steps may not benefit you. In that case, I would recommend researching and implementing other search engine optimization methods for your web site.