August 7th, 2010 by Jon

It stands to reason that when every publisher wants their site to climb higher onto results pages, there are some things people who don’t place highly are doing very wrong. Perhaps they didn’t chose to employ a good search engine optimization agency, or maybe the sites just aren’t very good. Understanding some common mistakes which lead sites to languish near the end of results where few users venture can help you to avoid them yourself.

1. Don’t feature bad content. When there’s a lot to think about, it’s tempting to go for the easy option. It takes a lot of time and effort to produce high quality content and to the busy publisher, ways around this or apparent short cuts can be very appealing. Some questions they might ask themselves are “Why create new content when there’s so much out there I can steal?” or “Why not just pay someone who knows little about the subject a couple of dollars to write it for me?” Well, they may seem like reasonable questions at a busy time for your site, but the truth is that there are very good reasons. Stolen content is unoriginal and many search engines will pick up on that and rank your site accordingly. If it’s copied then it’s also probably out of date, which means that it won’t be so interesting for visitors to your site to read. Search engines and users alike need to find fresh and relevant content if they are to respect your site. Many publishers make the mistake of having text on their pages that has grammatical or spelling mistakes. Like featuring badly put together material, this is again simply bad practice. It’s worth noting that links can be bad content too, if they take users where they don’t need to go, or worse, to a spam site.

2. Take the robots to the pictures. As far as SEO is concerned, poor quality pictures are those that won’t be recognized by the robots sent by search engines to read your site. To bring the robots to your pictures they need to be titled effectively. Simply naming a picture numerically will do nothing to enhance your appeal to search engines. Similarly, Flash, Java and frames all amount to bad content, even if they do make your page more attractive to users. Robots need to be able to read text, and HTML is the best format. A good piece of advice you’re likely to hear from any reputable SEO agency is to feature HTML text alongside that in pictures, frames, Flash, drop-down menus or Java. This HTML text will provide a pathway for robots to read your content, and that’s vital if you want to score points!

3. Don’t have too little content. Short may be sweet, and minimalism may be appealing, but having too little content on a site can be fatal. For search engines to perceive your site as attractive and relevant, it needs things to read. Not only does it need to see a good amount of content, but that content needs to be fresh. Think of your site as a stall on a market. Potential customers are likely to pass you by and head to the next stall if all you have are a couple of cabbages at the bottom of a box. The cabbages on the next stall in bountiful supply will attract their eyes and custom more. Similarly, your cabbages need to be fresh. If the content on your site is not fresh, search engines will probably ignore it after a while, assuming that it’s become stale and irrelevant. With this issue of content in mind, every SEO company will recommend featuring a blog on your site. In fact, the search engines are themselves now actively encouraging the inclusion of a blog as excellent SEO practice. A blog is perfect forum for fresh content. Not only that but you can take the time to make the content as good as possible, thus addressing any quality issues that you might in relation to tip number one!

There are many other things to consider when you plan to avoid ranking poorly on results pages, and any good SEO company can advise you on them in detail. They include bad keyword and link building strategies, poor SMM and a lack of SMO.

If you keep our three tips in mind you should rise above the bottom of the results.

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