The majority of webmasters just don’t understand the fundamental principles that are a necessity to promote a website on the Search Engines. I often find tactics used that I would definitely not utilise to promote any website on line.
Often these mistakes are made in complete innocence due to a lack of understanding of the basic principles. Whilst these sorts of errors will not necessarily get your web site banned from Google they will do very little to improve your search engine rankings. All too many web sites just do not get any traffic at all and therefore do not provide any true business benefit because they do not rank in the search engines for key terms/keywords.
However checking your website for some of these common webmaster mistakes and correcting them will put you on the route to search engine placement.
Text In Images
frequently inexperienced webmasters include some of the important web page copy in pictures. They tend to do this to overcome layout problems. Unfortunately search engines like Google do not recognise text embedded in images and therefore your copy is lost. And of course it is the words on the page that tell Google what your page is about.
Tip: A good way to see what text (words) you have on on your page is to do a search on Google for cache:www.domain-name/web-page.html (i.e add cache: to the front of your webpage URL). Then click on the link to the right hand side of the cached page results that says ‘text-only version’.
This will allow you to see a text version of your page which is what Google and co. will use to index your web page.
If the cache search produces no result then your pages may not be listed but you can find out how to fix this by visiting the silent salesman.
Bad Use of Alt Text
Each image on your web page should contain a suitably filled alt tag. Many webmasters just leave this blank to save time but the alt tags can be used to help promote your web pages. The alt text or alt attribute is part of the img tag as follows alt=”text”.
The alt attribute should provide some description of the image content which is displayed if the image can’t be loaded or if someone is using a text browser or screen reader. But the great thing is that it can also be used to contain relevant keywords for your web page.
But be careful it is not a good place to start stuffing keywords. Just use one relevant image on each page to contain a keyword phrase just once in the alt text then fill out all the other alt tags in a natural way that describes the image in question. If you find a way to include a keyword then great but do not force it.
But importantly do not just add lots of keywords to the alt tags as this will just give you a black mark. This is what Google says in it’s guidelines.
Filling alt attributes with keywords (”keyword stuffing”) results in a negative user experience, and may cause your site to be perceived as spam. Instead, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
Tip: You can also include the title attribute to the image tag to show even more relevant words about your image/page just add title=”my title” to your image tags.
Poor Quality Page Content
You must try to provide unique, quality content on your web site. Google itself identifies this as being one of the most important things to consider and this is what I do to promote my website pages.
You should not just take text from other webpages and include it on your own web site. By all means research what others say about your topic but then rewrite everything in your own words including any relevant keywords in a natural way when you can.
Many people struggle to do this thinking that quantity is important. However remember that a small amount of unique relevant (to your topic) content will do you far more good than pages of copied text.
There are many more examples of simple, easy to implement changes that can be made to help promote your website. You can find out more by visiting The-Silent-Salesman.com.
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