On-Site SEO - What to Avoid

Some learn by doing. That is articles about on-site optimization techniques which could provide painful lessons if implemented. An over-all overview of several rudimentary what to avoid when performing on-site optimization.

At some level, SEO, or SEO, is really a game of one-upsmanship between your se's and optimizers. By the end of the 90's se's paid a lot of focus on META tags and what that they had to say in regards to a page. The ensuing cascade of Metatag spam finished up causing se's to devalue them significantly or ignore them completely. This short article discusses other, similarly abused "optimization" techniques that could be painfully transparent to find engines and may bring about penalization in case a site is caught employing them.

Basic Keyword Spamming

It is telling that hardly anyone mentions META tags anymore, even for the intended purpose of keyword spamming. After having been so aggressively prevented by se's for so a long time, their usefulness to even hard core "black hat" SEOs is negligible. The sunset of Metatag spam was the dawn of on-page keyword stuffing, a concept that still appears to carry just a little weight nowadays. Relentlessly repeating a keyword, keyphrase, or group of keywords multiple times through the entire text of a full page continues to be considered spamming, even though the keywords involved are wrapping in "legitimate" paragraphs.

The early manner of "invisible text" (text exactly the same color because the background), or very small text is currently generally decided to be obvious to many search engines. There's now argument concerning whether similar effects accomplished via CSS remain effective. Modern stuffing techniques area bit more refined nowadays. Rather than repeating the keyword again and again within a, obvious invisible or tiny block, the keyword is liberally spaced throughout paragraphs and titles. The worst offenders use content scrapers to produce a soup of text that, to search engines spider, is meant to seem like natural language. It'll appear as not natural language to a genuine individual.

Always develop this content of a niche site for all those actual humans, who would like to easily read and understand your details. A good simple technique like replacing pronouns or indefinite articles with specific keywords will come off as clumsy and poor writing to a human. Stuffing keywords into areas humans generally don't see, such as for example "alt" tags on images and "title" tags on tables can be discouraged. The principal use for these tags is for accessibility. Put simply, they aide the disabled, utilizing a screen-reader program for instance, to gain information regarding the page that others wouldn't normally necessarily need. Se's have devalued text in these areas for optimization purposes, though at once it had been thought they may be useful, as well as perhaps, were.

Linking Issues

A few general notes specifically regarding internal linking issues, since this applies primarily to on-page efforts. Avoid broken links. If the page was moved temporarily or have been permanently deleted, cope with the issue as fast as possible. Systemic broken links might have an impact on a sites overall ranking should they remain for long periods of time. Clearing up broken links is merely good practice, beyond the possible SEO benefits. In case a page has moved, put in a 301 redirect to take care of the problem. 301 redirects are primarily to take care of incoming external links to a full page from sites over that your webmaster does not have control. Update the inner links to take care of the brand new location directly.

Duplicate Content

There is agreement a duplicated content "penalty" exists in Google, though from what extent it penalizes sites is up for debate. Many have the "penalty" is only a devaluation of the duplicate page itself. Google decides what's the higher of the 2 (or even more) versions of the "duplicate" page and, when searched, provides that page while relegating the others to supplemental results or not displaying them at all. Others contend there may be a stronger penalty that effects the website all together. Duplicate content can be an issue that directly effects articles like this. Publishing them on your own website is intended to create content, but does it do worthwhile if Google merely considers it a duplicate? Some believe there is a magical threshold percentage Google uses when determining how similar two pages are. An excellent rule is always to make sure this content placed round the article, the navigation, layout, etc., is really as unique as you possibly can. Also, provide unique titles and meta tags for the articles to help expand differentiate it from others enjoy it.

Conclusions

The issues covered here could possibly be the consequence of a deliberate spamming campaign or a major accident of wanting to perform legitimate optimization. Google repeats their mantra that designers should build sites for folks rather than for spiders whenever pressed for information regarding their algorithms. This can be a good rule to check out when avoiding spamming techniques, as much of these create sites that result in a bad user experience for anyone else, regardless of how good they could may actually a spider.