When it comes to succeeding in the search engines, you must pin-point problem areas and eliminate them with lightning speed. Professional search engine optimization is a competition that doesn’t have room for errors, believe me!
1. Don’t fall for obtaining low quality links. Always research out the popularity of websites that you obtain links from, and avoid obtaining links from link farms.
2. Don’t obtain links using the same anchor text and description repeatedly in short bursts, that is a red flag to the search engines that you want to manipulate their well thought out algorithm.
3. Make sure you always have unique Meta and Title Tags for EVERY page. You need to understand that every title should have at least one unique element to set it apart from your other pages. Include major keywords in your title and make it appealing so that it actually receives clicks!
4. Update your website regularly. You should run a blog with bi-weekly updates at a minimum on your website if you really want to succeed. Also research out the blog topics and use titles and keywords that will generate an increase in website traffic you are not tapping in to.
5. Don’t over do reciprocal linking, and have a diverse link portfolio! According to Google, reciprocal linking is valuable - however it can be harmful if it is overdone. You should obtain links from Blogs, Blog Posts, Forums, Reciprocal links, Articles, Social Media bookmarks and more!
6. Don’t be deceitful to the search engines. Don’t try to over use keywords, hide text or create doorway pages. Everything on your website should be well thought out, unique and valuable to both search engines and users. These are often times signs of black hat seo.
7. Network with other website owners. You need to create great relationships with powerful website owners and use those relationships to benefit both yourself and the other website owner. Get advice from them, get links from them and give something back!
8. Research out your competition. You need to know what your competition is doing in every way. Find out where they are getting links from. Find out what they are doing on their website, and determine any new ideas they are using to generate traffic, links and business!
9. Work hard and don’t give up. Search engine optimization is a tiring and hard to accomplish effort, and once you have put in effort you need to stick with it and never consider giving up. Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.
Joel McLaughlin
4 Responses to “9 Barriers Preventing Website Owners From Search Success”
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May 8th, 2009 at 2:51 am
It appears you can never learn too much about Search Engine Optimization. These are pretty basic barriers, issues, or problems that most novice webmasters are faced during the beginning phase of SEO. Most of the data was referring to a quality link campaign which is important to any webmaster. #9 is really the key to success. It takes lots of work to get ranked high on the search engines. Especially when the crawlers, spider, and bots only scan over your website 1 time a day and your site cache is refreshed about every week. It does take some time. Be prepared for some waiting
June 15th, 2009 at 1:44 am
Nice article and sound advice Joel. I’m not too sure about the advice about anchor text though. Ideally it’s not great to get the same anchor text but you do always want to get your main keyword related to your business in text links to your site.
June 26th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Thanks for the response guys.. My thought on the Anchor text and link description issue is that website owners should always change the surrounding text of inbound links and have the anchor text vary occasionally, while always including your major keywords that you are targeting in the anchor text. I see a lot of website owners request 3 way and reciprocal links and always repeat the same anchor text and description underneath the text which seems like a red flag.
July 17th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Along with having unique title and meta tags for every page, H1 tag is also another important input for the bots. One can add a keyword in the H1 tag. This also increases the density and importance of that keyword for the crawlers on concerned page.