5 Common SEO Mistakes

Posted on 05. Jun, 2009 by admin.

Splash Intro Page
One of the common trends today is to have Splash Intro Page, or a page that is solely of graphics and flash with one or two image links to the main content. While this may give your website a modern and updated appearance it inhibits the search engine crawlers from properly indexing your website. Your homepage is the highest ranked and most crawled page on your website, therefore it needs to contain the necessary keywords and content to ensure that your page is ranked correctly.

Image and Flash Content
Like Splash Intro Pages, Flash and the heavy use of graphics are common trends for people wanting a modern and trendy website. The downside of this is a lack of the HTML based text that is needed by the search engine crawlers. One common mistake is to embed text within an image or Flash fine. This can be avoided by simply using CSS to overlay text over an image or Flash file using divisions.

Duplicate Content
Search engines frown upon copied content. This includes content from other websites, as well as content on your own website. Ultimately the more content you have, the higher you will most likely rank. If you have multiple pages with the same content, or content that matches a competitors website, your ranking will actually go down. If your lacking content ideas it is fine to look to other websites for inspiration, feel free to take what they have and improve upon it. Adding your own twist to it could be the key to pulling traffic from competitors websites, to your own.

Lack of Content
While your website should not be treated like a pad of paper where you write down everything on your mind, it does need a fair amount of content to rank higher. Often times site owners do not plan their websites out properly and fail to include enough room to for necessary text content. Need content ideas? Write down a list of keywords that you think could be used to search for your website. Now go over each word, one at a time, and brainstorm sentences or paragraphs that can be created with that word. Once you have done this with a some or all of your words, read the sentences back to yourself and with an open mind you will always find ways to seamlessly merge them together.

Improper Coding
This is one of the most common mistakes, but also the easiest mistake to avoid or fix. Simply adding small amounts of code to certain tags will actually improve your search ratings. These include “alt” attribute in the image tag, different titles on each page, adding “meta tag” keywords and a description in the head of the page, and ensuring that each tag is closed. With a WYSIWYG text editor you can make these changes in less than 10 minutes per page.

Continue Reading

Writing Your First Wordpress Post

Posted on 18. Mar, 2009 by admin.

This is a simple, yet effective, quick-start guide to navigating the page elements of WordPress in order to post your first post.
Your first step is to simply to find the “Post” button, this will navigate you to a page where you will be able to enter a post, convenient right? If you do not see a “Post” option, you are most likely in the wrong area. Please return to your admin panel located at www.yoursite.com/blog/wp-admin/, replace the example site and directory with your own. After you have found your post entry page, please refer to the following image.
(more…)

Continue Reading

Choosing The Right Colors

Posted on 17. Mar, 2009 by admin.

In web design colors play a much bigger role that simply filing white space. Each color has a psychological effect on the human mind and if planned out well you can take advantage of this on your website. First you must decide the mood you are going for and then you must decide which moods to mesh together. On top of all that you must also make sure that the colors are visually appealing for if they are not the whole psychological aspect will be blocked out by its lack of attraction. Bellow I will list the colors and the feelings or moods they express. Read on to learn more about these colors.
(more…)

Continue Reading

Promoting Your Website

Posted on 12. Mar, 2009 by admin.

Now that you are online you need to promote your website so that others know you exist. Listed below are some popular, and simple, ways to do this.
(more…)

Continue Reading

Complete Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Posted on 11. Mar, 2009 by admin.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving website traffic by appearing earlier in search engine search results. There are typically two forms of search results when using a search engine, “organic” results and “sponsored” results. Organic results are the websites that the search engine finds with programs that “crawl” the Internet; websites do not have to pay to be listed here. Sponsored listings are online companies who pay to have their websites appear during a search query. When optimizing a website for search engines, we focus on organic search results.
(more…)

Continue Reading