ChronicSEO

There are a lot of tips about the right things to do for good SEO but to play the other side of the coin, here are 10 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid :

1. Hiring Unethical SEO Consultants :
Nowadays, you can see many companies providing SEO services. Some SEO guys use purely ethical techniques, while others use unethical “black hat” SEO. Even the person who hired the SEO guy do not know the consultants techniques, sometimes until it’s too late when the site gets punished. If you want to hire a consultant, choose a reputable SEO consultant, one who will keep in regular contact with progress reports and updates.

2. Use of “Black Hat” Techniques :
Same as mentioned above, black hat techniques like as doorway pages, keyword stuffing, hidden text etc are the examples techniques you want to avoid.

3. Expecting Immediate Results :
Its not possible you will get immediate results in SEO. You must have patience in you. Successful SEO requires good link building which takes time. SO you must agree to spend lots of time with good patience.

4.Do-It-Yourself Attitude :
Many people make the mistake of thinking they can do their own SEO work. They feel SEO is an easy task and easy to learn but but SEO has an ever evolving learning curve. It involves understanding Google’s complicated algorithm changes that happen quite frequently. It’s a never ending task so if you don’t have the time to put into maintaining the work, hire somebody who does.

5. Untargeted Keywords :
Many times people ignore important long-tail keywords and only work for one or two of the highest ranking keywords. After getting good rankings, if they don’t get enough traffic, they complain that the keywords must be the problem. Always target as many keywords and long-tailed keyword phrases as possible.

6. Title Tag :
Many times, the most glaring example of poor SEO technique is the title tag. We can see many title tags have a company or product name but no keywords. Other times the title tag is stuffed with too many keywords which dilute the relevancy. The trick is to find a happy medium of a relatively short title with the most pertinent keywords.

7. Non-Relevant Linking :
As you know if you have more backlinks, chances of getting good ranking in Google are increased greatly but many SEOs just count irrelevant links as a backlinks. They don’t care whether the backlinks are coming from a site with relevant content or not. All links are not created equal and it’s extremely important that the links you build are relevant.

8. Multiple Search Engine Submission :
Nowadays search engine submission is not necessary. Sites get indexed and ranked naturally if they have related backlinks with them. Multiple submissions may consider as an attempt to spam the search engines.

9. Unnecessary Graphics and Flash :
Many web designers sacrifice SEO just for good looking sites with heavy graphics or Flash. Flash is the worst SEO mistake because any text in your Flash movie is not picked up by the search engines. Avoid putting heavy flash or graphics on a site instead put a combination of smaller graphics with good amount of unique content. Also remember to add “alt” and “title” tags for your images.

10. All Search Engines are Not the Same :
Many people think that all search engines are the same. Optimize your content, keywords, links so that there is something for at least one of the three top search engines. Of course, Google is the most important but Yahoo and Bing do send traffic.

There you have my 10 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid. Hope you can learn something from it.

There has been a long standing debate amongst SEO experts as to whether static URLs are more effective than dynamic URLls where search engine indexing is concerned. The majority of the community has sided with static URLs and the recommendation to re-write dymanic URLs into static ones using .htaccess and mod_rewrite. The general consensus being that static URLs can be keyword rich whereas dynamic URLs are not.

In a posting on Google Webmaster Central, Juliane Stiller and Kaspar Szymanski of Google’s Search Quality Team have debunked several of the myths and misconceptions related to writing URLs as static or dynamic.

The reaction to this announcment was met with mixed emotions as evidenced by some of the comments on the article. One commentor named Leslie stated the obvious, dynamic URLs related to database driven e-commerce or shopping cart sites being a necessary evil and Google’s advice to leave dynamic URLs as dynamic is perceived as a good thing…

On the other hand, another commentor named briansol has a valid point about W3 recommendations to re-write dynamic URLs as an element of style.

Changes to the W3 recommended standards often conjure up the comparison to a Microsoft-ish approach to alter internet standards to suit their own needs and to distance themselves from competitors. However, in this case, I don’t think Google is trying to re-invent the wheel, the real issue is problematic indexing of directory URLs when webmasters choose to utilize mod_rewrite to create static looking URLs. The key to this issue is evidenced in one paragraph towards the end of the article…

As you can see in the examples given by Google, the problems will start when Gogolebot starts breaking the URL down into it’s components and tries to index each non-existant directory in the URL. In the case of the first URL, Googlebot will attempt to index the following :

• www.example.com/article/
• www.example.com/article/bin/
• www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/
• www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/
• www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3/
• www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3/98971298178906/

Probably none of the sub-directories created by a clean re-write exampled above actually exist as physical directories yet Googlebot will try to index them nonetheless. Most experienced SEO’s are well aware of this glaring problem with Googlebot and purposely write another set of 301 redirects to circumvent the crawler’s inadequacies. This has always been a fundamental problem with Googlebot, it tends to go where it shouldn’t and the results can sometimes be disasterous for webmasters and SEOs. Wordpress publishers can tell you that Googlebot will ignore important links fed to it and go for category indexed and page indexes instead of following the hierarchical linking order set by the CMS.

The answer to Google’s URL crawling problem is relatively simple, don’t let Googlebot index a URL if it isn’t linked to. Telling webmasters that they should now abandon elements of style supported by the W3 for over a decade is not a solution. The solution lies in fixing a crawler that doesn’t follow links properly and crawls links it makes up all by itself.

What do you think? Will you follow Google’s advice and stop using mod_rewrite and start using dynamic links or will you follow the W3 standards ?

It seems Google’s spiders have a habit of indexing a site by not only it’s domain name but by it’s IP address. To find out if your site has been indexed by IP as well as domain name, go to Google and do the following two searches :

site:mysite.com (and) site:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

where mysite.com is your domain and xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is your sites IP address. If you see any results for the search by your IP address, Google is indexing you by IP and it’s not been proven or disproven that this will result in duplicate content. In that Google is an automated system, as an SEO, you must learn to take the human factor out of the algorithm and optimize your site for furthive pitfalls such as this and ensure that the search engine spiders are finding things the way you want them to find them.

I guess you could always do an .htaccess 301 redirect to make sure the IP doesn’t get indexed and to fix canonicalization.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xxx\.xxx\.xxx\.xxx [nc,or]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This .htaccess rewrite code will not only redirect IP requests but it will also redirect requests for mysite.com to www.mysite.com

All you have to do is swap out the xxx’s with your IP and mysite with your domain name.

Hope this helps

It looks like there has been some sort of toolbar pagerank update over the last weekend. As usual, all you hear are the people who are moaning and groaning about their expectations being dashed against the shore not unlike a ship tossed in a violent storm. Back to reality,,,

For all the real SEO’s out there:

The update seems to have been targeting internal pages and not much true flutter on domain PR was experienced as much as the internal changes. It also seems that Google’s algorithm has tightened specifically on Wordpress blogs and many internal pages that once had PR have now been zeroed. Granted, the vast majority of the time Google’s spiders tend to find the things we don’t want them to find, it can be taken as a lesson on how to build sites that are truly optimized.