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Avoid Making The Search Engine Gods Angry
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There are a few tips that can take you a long way when it comes
to not poisoning your own efforts in the search engines. Instead
of telling you all the great things to do (which are all closely
held secrets), here are 10 more important things NOT to do, that
everyone should be careful of. This is how to avoid angering the
search engines Gods so that you get a good ranking! I only wish
someone had written an article like this and I had read it when
I started, so many years ago ;)


1: Repeat submission - The search engines do not like it when
you submit your pages too often. It won't help you and can
definitely hurt you. We like to do our clients once a week
and that is quite sufficient. If you submit too frequently,
your page will be penalized and it may be kicked out entirely.


2: Repeat keywords - You should be very careful how you use
your keywords on your site. Do NOT repeat them over and
over (ex: viagra, viagra, viagra, ...) Use this tool to get
your keyword density on your home page to between 2.1 and
2.8%. The free tool is located here
http://www.babblebot.com under the Tools section.


3: Overpopulating your Meta keywords - Don't have a list of
words that could make up a dictionary stuffed into your
meta keyword tag. It dilutes the strength of the really
important words and you won't rank well for anything. If
you need to rank well for many keywords, optimize a few
different pages. Keep the number of meta keywords down to
around six words or so.


4: Tiny text - Have you ever seen crazy little writing on
some sites? Wonder why it is there? So do we because it
doesn't do anything for the owners except make them look silly.
The search engines are aware of this little game and now
if your font size is less then 2 in your html, you will
have problems ranking with the engines. Keep the text
readable, or don't put it there at all.


5: Same color text and background - Another trick devised by
the "leaders" in web page optimization - adult sites. Make
the text the same color as the background so that no one
can read it. Sorry, like the above tip it has been found
out. It may have worked years ago... but no more. Don't even
play the game where you keep the colors close to the
background (but slightly different). Use high contrast
colors to ensure you are not penalized.


6: 100% CGI driven sites - The search engines are smart, but
not smart enough to follow cgi's that have "?" marks in
them to delineate the script name and the parameters. If
every link on your home page is a cgi call, the spider will
not follow them to plumb the depths of your site. This is
bad because they are missing all the good content you have
in the rest of your site. The content it could have found
adds validity to the keywords, etc... that you have chosen.


7: Submitting too many pages - There is absolutely no need to
submit every page on your site to an engine. In fact they
don't like it and your ranking will suffer because of it.
They have built spider's and robots to do this so that you
don't have to. Submit your home url, and any pages you
think that are key (keep it below 5). If you have a page
that changes significantly, resubmit it by hand because it
will get update in the engines faster then waiting for a
spider to re-visit.


8: Using Frames without a noframes section - The search engine
spiders will not go into your frames. I have no clue why
they don't. Our company (Open Technology Consulting) has
built spiders that crawl sites using frames and they are
not hard. Be that as it may, there is a section called the
"noframes" section you can use to get spiders to crawl your
site. This is the page that gets shown if the person
showing up at your site doesn't have a frames enabled
browser. The spiders will look here, so have a link to
every page on your site in the noframes section.


9: 100% flash sites - Flash is cool. If you don't think flash
is cool (and you are using DSL, Cable modem or a direct
connect to the internet) visit here http://www.heavy.com.
You can do great things with flash for presentation, but
the search engines aren't interested in watching movies.
They can't grab any of the information they need out of the
flash movies to decide how to place your site. So you must
have a front page or doorway pages (for a description of
what a doorway page is go here
http://www.babblebot.com/services/dwiz/dwiz.html ) that
have all the normal content for the search engines to use.


10: Fast Meta Refresh - You can't have a text filled page that
the search engine likes but no human could handle and have
it refresh to your real homepage. People that have doorway
pages (usually very ugly pages with a lot of text that
makes no sense to anyone but search engines spiders) try
all sorts of things to redirect the user without seeing the
page. We have built some top-secret technology to do it
that the spiders don't see, but you can't use that standard
"This is a 2-second refresh, if you NEED to do it make sure
the refresh is for more then 15 seconds.

So that's your crash course in keeping the search engines
happy. If you don't understand what I have been talking
about make sure your webmaster or web developer reads this
and makes sure your site is OK!

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Get Unlimited Access To Excellent New Search Engine Optimization
& Submission Tools at http://www.babblebot.com!
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About the author:
Darcy MacDonald operates Babblebot, an excellent new site
dedicated to search engine submission, ranking, and
optimization services.

To find out how you can use the new doorway page
generator to get a top ranking position in all the major
search engines, visit http://www.babblebot.com today!
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