Tips

Everyone wants to get to the top of the list of the great Google. There are many things you could do to increase your chances of ranking on page one, but let’s look at 5 things you shouldn’t do. These thing will cause your ranking to drop so try best to avoid them.

1. Cloaking

Showing search engines one thing and site visitors another is known as cloaking. Using sneaky redirects or custom coding to trick the bots is not good practice. No one wants to click a search result expecting one thing and get redirected to something totally off topic.

2. Purchasing Links

Never buy links to your site. This does not refer to niche directories. Those would be considered quality links. Link farms, or sites just full of links to any and everything, should be avoided. You are judged by the company you keep, so make sure your links are coming from quality sites, not catch all link exchange sites.

3. Duplicate Content

Write your own, original content. If you run two websites, always change up your writing. Search engines want to know where the original, quality content came from. Don’t make it hard for them by duplicating your content.

4. Slow Server

You click a search result and the site doesn’t load. How disappointed are you?! No one wants that to happen. If your site is slow loading or experiencing outages, fix it! Ask to be moved to a new server or find a new hosting company.

5. Hidden Text

This also refers to microscopic text. Do not make your font color the same as your background color and stuff it with keywords. Do not make your font so small that human eyes can’t read it with a magnifying glass. Never put anything on your site solely for the search bots. All text should be readable and understandable to both bots and visitors. Make your content legible and visible and everyone will be happy.

Imforza.com put together a nice infographic focusing on SEO predictions, data and tips for 2013. Some of these are things I’ve been pushing the past few months. Search engine ranking is an ongoing job, ever changing, ever evolving. It’s definitely not something you do once and forget about it. So, here’s a few things to focus on in the upcoming year:

I often get clients coming to me that want to change their website completely, not only a new look, but a new url as well. I have no problem doing that, but it’s important to think about it first. How important is that new url you want to use?

If you have an existing site, it’s probably indexed in Google to some extent. Maybe you’ve been working hard at getting ranked at the top. That’s something you need to consider when you change your domain. You absolutely must put up a 301 redirect and you must expect that your ranking is going to drop, hopefully only slightly, for at least a short time.

Once you’re new url is in place, you should try to get all of your backlinks pointing to the new site. If you’ve joined a directory of some sort, have your website listed in your sig line of a forum, you’re email, a friend’s site that might be linking to yours, anywhere you can update the url, you must do that as soon as you can.

Just be patient and you’ll rebound.