As any Internet marketer worth his salt will tell you in order to succeed online with your home based business you will need an effective search engine optimization strategy (SEO) so you can get the rankings and the website traffic you require to make sales and create a regular and consistent monthly income.
Simply put, SEO is the process of making your website attractive to the major search engines online so you will be able to attain the highest page ranking possible when people are looking for information related to your home page content.
In order to accomplish this of course, you must do what Google and the other search engines want you to do in order to get their attention. However, if you think you know what you’re doing but, in reality, you don’t here are 4 things the search engines don’t want you to do and you should try to avoid doing at all costs:
1. Perhaps the biggest mistake people make when trying to promote their web page to the search engines is keyword overload. Repeating your keywords over and over again on your website isn’t going to make the search engines happy and certainly will do nothing to help your ranking.
Adding keywords just for the sake of adding keywords or adding words which have nothing to do with your website content will do nothing to enhance your standing in the eyes of Google, Yahoo and Bing. Always write your editorials with your visitors in mind and not the search engines because if you over do it your traffic and sales will suffer and, as a result, so will your bottom line.
2. Don’t forget about your competition when you’re optimizing your website for keyword searches. Do a search in Google or Yahoo for web pages similar to yours who are achieving first page ranking and try to discover how they’re doing it.
Is it because they’re major companies with major budgets to dedicate to their SEO strategies or are these sites similar to yours, but who are just well versed in their SEO techniques and are very good at what they’re doing. It’s nice to know where you stand in relation to your competition so you can make the necessary adjustments to your strategy so you can compete with them online.
3. Adding too many links to your web page can also penalize your ranking potential as far as Google and company are concerned. Going over 100 connections per page is generally frowned upon and staying below this number is the usual rule of thumb you should abide by.
You should also be careful about which websites you link to because if the search engines aren’t happy with their performance you may be penalizes as a result of linking to them. I guess we can call this guilt by association and it’s something you should try to avoid by investigating their rank before linking to them.
4. One other faux paux you should try to stay away from which is another one of the biggies committed by newbie’s online is not doing any keyword research whatsoever before building your website. The two major problems with this is first of all you may construct your home page using keywords which are very rarely searched for on the web which will result in a very low ranking and very little traffic for your website.
The second disadvantage of ignoring your keyword study is the words you do wind up using may be very competitive searches online which may result in a very long wait before you see any positive results from your efforts. Make sure you investigate how many searches per month your words and phrases generate online by using the free Google keyword tool before you decide which ones you’re going to use.
An effective search engine optimization strategy is critical for the long term success of your home based business online so by avoiding these mistakes and by implementing a well researched SEO strategy you will have a major edge over your competition on the web.