Top 15 Worst Website Practices - Part 2

In the last post we looked at the site practices that both search engines and visitors really hate, today we'll look more at what's more or less invisible to the visitor, but can penalize your search ranking. Your search engine rank is where you come up on the results page when someone does a search for you.

In this case, we're going to use a hypothetical band "Emerald" as an example (sorry if there is a band already called Emerald, but you didn't come up high enough in the search results for me to find you.)

8) You don't use the band name in the URL. If you can't buy emerald.com, .net, .org, .us, etc., URLs, then your url should at least have Emerald somewhere in it like, "emeraldband.com," "emeraldtheband.com", "emeraldbandchicago.com."

9) You don't use the band name in the title tag. The title tag is what come up on the top of browser page. In the case of this blog it says, "Music 3.0 - The Blog Behind The Book." To be really search engine friendly, you'd put something like "The Emerald Band From Chicago."

10) Your title tags are the same for all pages. If you have 18 pages on your site and they all have the same title text, you've robbed yourself of an excellent SEO opportunity. Each page is unique and title tag should be treated that way and directly apply to the uniqueness of the page.

11) You use superfluous text in your title tags. The use of "Welcome" may be the worst offender. A tag that says, "Welcome to Emerald" doesn't give the search engine much to go one (at least it has the name in it.) What would be better is something like, "Emerald - The Best Band In Chicago." That accomplishes 3 things - it states the name of the band, the fact that you are a band, and that you play in Chicago.

12) You incorrectly use anchor text. Anchor text is the text that is hyperlinked. Search engines love it when it actually describes something. Using a phrase like "click here," misses an SEO opportunity. For example. Good - "Here is the first part of the Top 15 Worst Website Practices." Bad - "For the first part of this article, click here." The first one is description and search engine friendly, the second isn't.

13) You use too many keywords. It was once thought that that you should include every possible relevant keyword that you can think of in your keyword metadata area. As a result, you'd find sites that would have 100 of them, but soon Google caught on and changed the rules. The problem is that Google now only recognizes the first 4 or 5, and may even penalize you if you use a lot more, so limit yourself to the best ones. Check these articles out called Finding Keyword Phrases, Finding Keywords With Google Suggest, and Finding Keywords With Google's Wonder Wheel (notice the anchor text?).

14) You practice "keyword stuffing." Keyword stuffing means that you use your keywords at every opportunity in the text on your page. Once again, Google doesn't like this and will probably even penalize you if you use a particular keyword more than 5% (some say it should even be as low as 2%.)

15) You use irrelevant keywords. Let's say that Emerald is a cover band and plays a lot of Beatle's songs. If you use The Beatles as a keyword without using it in the body of your text, it's considered irrelevant and may get you penalized. That's to keep you from loading up on the most popular keywords of the moment in order to send a lot of traffic your way. Doesn't work, so don't try it. If you use a keyword, it better be mentioned in the text somewhere for maximum SEO effect.

There are a lot more examples than the 8 included here and in the last post outlining the first 7 worst practices (anchor text again), but if you master these first, most of the others will probably take care of themselves.

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