Don't get your site thrown out the Search Engines

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Altering your website to increase its rankings in the search engine results is known as SEO or search engine optimisation. By doing this, you will increase the number of visitors to your site, which in turn will hopefully increase your website's revenue. The major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) all publish do's and don'ts for websites - failing to acknowledge these on your site could easily result in it being banned.

Whether you pay someone to do your SEO, or do it youself, ensure that your site adheres to the webmaster guidelines and doesn't engage in any black hat practices. These will get your site banned from the search engines, and once thrown out, it's difficult to get back in. Adhering to white hat practices and providing quality content is the best advice for getting high rankings.

Quick ways to get banned include keyword stuffing (using the same phrases or words repeatedly) or hiding text by having lots of keywords in the same colour as the background. The former renders your page unreadable, which defeats the purpose of having visitors to your site whilst the latter has been used by webmasters to get visitors there on false pretences - they think they're viewing a page on one topic and arrive to see something completely different.

Links from high quality or high ranking sites are much more important in helping your site rankings than just trying to get hundreds of links. Although this may take time, acquiring higher quality links really will help your site in the long run. To find higher authority sites, use Google's pagerank as a guide. The higher the pagerank out of 10, the harder it will be to get a link, but the more value it will pass to your site.

Don't be tempted into buying hundreds of links at a time - it's better to get a few links a week at a constant pace than getting a lot sporadically. And when you do link, ensure that you get links to both your homepage and other pages on your site. Link exchanges can be a good thing, but ensure that you are listed with similar sites rather than just a random selection.

Don't be tempted to fool Google or the other search engines - they will find you out. Practices they may not like and not mentioned above include meta tag stuffing, cloaking, duplicate content and multiple submissions. Meta tags can be useful to your site despite not all search engines using them, but don't be tempted to stuff them full of more keywords and phrases.

Cloaking is where you show one page to the search engines and another to your site's visitors - again it gets them there through false pretences. Having the same website on several different domains sounds like a good idea, but the search engines do penalise duplicate content, whether by dropping you from the results or putting you on the 350th page of results which amounts to the same thing. Finally, if your site is linked to properly, the search engines will find your site without you having to submit your site to them. Submit only once then exercise patience until your site appears.

Google Webmaster Guidelines - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines - http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html
MSN Guidelines for successful indexing - http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm

Also see Google webmaster guidelines in plain English

Labels: searchengines, seo, webdesign

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