Ten golden rules to avoid SEO mistakes

SEO has become the key of success of any website in today’s world, but still there are people who ignore the SEO part of their website and try to either find some cheaper ways to optimize their website or self optimize their website without having knowledge of SEO. At Himshilp we do a thorough study of our client’s website and its competitor’s website and then perform research to find the title, description, keywords, H1 tags and content in the respective client’s site.

I want to list 10 golden rules which could be followed, in order to avoid common SEO mistakes to optimize the websites:


Avoid badly framed website title:
Website title plays an important role in determining the rank of a page by search engines. If your website has irrelevant title, then your webpage will be given less relevance by search engine. After scanning your page the search engine matches your content with the title and keywords of your page, so it is very important to take care of few things while designing the title.

1. One should never use a keyword more than once in the title.

2. Title tag should be framed with 10 - 60 characters, without any special characters.

3. Always place the important keywords in the title obeying the rule of leftward i.e. the
First word is best, second is second best, etc.

4. The title should always relate to the content of the webpage, its meta description and
meta keywords and should be legible by the user.

5. There should be distinct title and description of each page.

Don’t use duplicate/ insufficient content of the page:
Never design duplicate or bad content for your webpage. Insufficient or Duplicate content will not be tolerated by search engines, even your websites can be banned. Content is known as the king of the web. So always write a content which is unique, friendly. Then people would like to link to you. You can even hire people who write decent unique content by paying them some amount.


Check all your backlinks (Poor backlinks/ less backlinks are harmful):
The quantity of backlinks/ incoming links of a website represent its popularity. The number of backlinks replicates the number of votes caste for a particular website or a web page. Google consider backlinks as a very important factor to determine page rank. Don’t link to the websites which are not relevant to your website as it will not benefit you. Always link to a high page-rank website. Google doesn’t support link-exchange, so better not adopt it. One way quality backlinks are always better for SEO. There are various ways to increase the backlinks. The submission to Directories & Search Engine Submission is the easiest yet powerful and result oriented activity. Creating interesting blogs and articles are also very helpful to get quality backlinks to your website. The social networking profiles can also be used to bring backlinks to your website.

Check all your internal links:
Broken internal links create negative impact on SEO. Always validate all your internal links so that there are no broken links in your website. Using similar anchor text in all the links is also not advised. Anchor text is the text which is the visible part of a hyperlink, never use the same anchor text in all your links like click here or some thing which is irrelevant to that link. Anchor text link should contain keywords. Use hyphenated filenames, but not long ones - two or three hyphens only. And try to use keywords in the urls also.


Use header tags in the content appropriately:
One of the POSITIVE ON-Page SEO Factors is the usage of keyword in H1, H2 and H3 tags. We should use these tags in order to get the page optimized. But the problem with these tags is that they don’t look nice as such in the web browsers for h1, h2 tags are too large and h5, h6 are too small. So overall appearance of the webpage gets distorted. That’s why generally people ignore them. But with the advent of style sheets it has become very easy for the programmers to change the hierarchy of the tags, so that one can view them in the browser with the appropriate size. Also one should never use H1 tag more than once in a page.


Use keywords properly:
Keywords are wonderful weapon of your websites so never ignore them whether it is keywords in meta tag, url, meta description.

meta keywords: Never use common meta keywords in all the webpages of your website. It will be screened as duplicate content filter checks by the SE. The common rule for Keyword in keyword meta tag is to use less than 10 words. Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be punished for irrelevance. No single word should appear more than twice. If not, it may be considered as spamming.

Keyword in URL: Often people ignore the proper usage keywords in url, and it is stuffed with irrelevant words. Always use appropriate description of the page content in the url assuming this hierarchy First word is the best, second is the second best, etc.

Keyword in description meta tag: Do not put similar descriptions for all the pages. It should be unique for all the pages and relevant to the page content. Ideally it should contain less than 200 chars.

High Keyword density in body text: Ideally keyword density should be 5- 20% - (all keywords/ total words). Individual keyword density should be 1 - 6% - (each keyword/ total words). But if you are thinking that using keyword everywhere will make the page more relevant then its wrong assumption. Do not stuff keywords unreasonably everywhere.


Make proper XML sitemap of the website:
Sitemaps helps you communicate with the SE. Website gets indexed in various search engines by XML sitemap. So always update your sitemap so that your webpages get indexed easily in the search engines.


Use < img> tag properly:
Most of the times the images are overlooked in SEO. Long and meaningless names of the images convey nothing to the search engine, try to incorporate some keywords in the image name so that the search engine will list them. Use alt tag to describe the images. ALT tags should contain a description of what the image is. It is a labeling device to translate your image into text for search engines. It also translates your image into a textual reference for users with visual handicaps. So use < img> tag carefully.


Don’t use too much of javascript where it is not required:
Use as much as clean HTML code instead of javascript code as the search engine could not translate java script.


Have patience:
There is no shortcut to get listed in top 10 for the selected keywords. It takes time for a page to get indexed in Google. So have patience and be vigilant. Publish unique quality content, by validating it and reinsure that it gets indexed properly in the search engine, this is an ongoing process, so keep changing the content of the website since if you will optimize your website for once and take a backseat then you can be out of index.

Finally be cautious of those internet marketing firms who give you 100% assurance in getting the pages indexed. Even Google says that there is no rule to get the 100% optimization and the rules to optimize the webpage are keeps on changing so be vigilant and take the appropriate step.

Importance of Page rank for website

Page Rank (often denoted by PR) is Google’s ranking software that calculates the relevance of a webpage with its content. Page Rank is a quantity (between 0 and 10) defined by Google that provides a rough estimate of the overall importance of a web page.

Page Rank is displayed as a green bar to the left of a webpage listing in the Google Directory, and also in the Google toolbar
The basic factor behind defining a page rank is the keywords
• If your keywords are Rare and Unique, then Page Rank doesn't matter.
• If your keywords are very Competitive, then Page Rank becomes very important

There are "over 200 SEO factors" that Google uses to rank pages in the Google search results (SERPs). There are certain google search engine optimization rules which effects the page rank they are

1. Positive ON-Page SEO Factors.

2. Negative ON-Page SEO Factors.

3. Positive OFF-Page SEO Factors.

4. Negative OFF-Page SEO Factors.

Some of these factors are listed below:
POSITIVE ON-Page SEO Factors:
• Keyword
o Keyword in URL: First word is best, second is second best, etc
o Keyword in domain name: Same as in page-name-with-hyphens
o Keyword in title tag: Title tag 10 - 60 characters, no special characters.
o Keyword in description meta tag: less than 200 chars. Google no longer "relies" upon this tag, but will often use it.
o Keyword in keyword meta tag: less than 10 words. Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be penalized for irrelevance. No single word should appear more than twice.
If not, it may be considered spam. Google purportedly no longer uses this tag, but others do.
o Keyword density in body text:5- 20% - (all keywords/ total words)
o Individual keyword density: 1 - 6% - (each keyword/ total words)
o Keyword in H1, H2 and H3: Use Hx font style tags appropriately
o Keyword font size: "Strong is treated the same as bold, italic is treated the same as emphasis".
o Keyword in alt text: Should describe graphic - Do NOT fill with spam
o Keyword in links to site pages (anchor text): Links out anchor text use keyword
• NAVIGATION - INTERNAL LINKS
o Link should contain keywords.
o Use hyphenated filenames, but not long ones - two or three hyphens only.
o Check that all Internal links are valid or not.
• NAVIGATION - OUTGOING LINKS
o External link: Link only to good sites
o Validate all links periodically
o Less than 100 links out total
o Avoid "Link Churn"
o Outgoing link Anchor Text : Should be on topic, descriptive
• OTHER ON-Page Factors
o Smaller files are preferred, Try not to exceed 100K page size
o Use Hyphens in URL
o Freshness of Pages: Changes over time, Newer the better - Google likes fresh pages.
o Freshness of Links: Excellent for high-trust sites, May not be so good for newer, low-trust sites
o Frequency of Updates: Frequent updates are equal to frequent spidering that generates newer cache.
o URL length: Keep it minimized - use somewhat less than the 2,000 characters allowed by IE - less than 100 is good, less is even better
• OTHER ON-SITE Factors
o Site Age: Old is the best
o Site Size - Google likes big sites
o Age of page vs. age of site: Newer pages on an older site will get faster recognition

Negative ON-Page SEO Google Ranking Factors

• Text represented graphically is invisible to search engines.
• Too high keyword repetition (keyword stuffing) may get you the Over Optimization Penalty.
• Redirect thru refresh metatags: Don't immediately send your visitor to another page other than the one he/ she clicked on, using meta refresh.
• Keyword dilution: Targeting too many unrelated keywords on a page, which would detract from theming, and reduce the importance of your REALLY important keywords.
• Flash page : Most SE spiders can't read Flash content Provide an HTML alternative, or experience lower SERP positioning.
• Use of frames should be avoided as SE has problems with frames.
• Excessive JavaScript should not be used.
• Invisible text Google advises against this.
• Gateway, doorway page Google advises against this.
• Duplicate content Google advises against this
• HTML code violations Google advises against this


POSITIVE OFF-Page SEO Google Ranking Factors
Incoming links :
• Based on the Number and Quality of links to you Google link reporting continues to display just a SMALL fraction of your actual backlinks, and they are NOT just greater than PR4 - they are mixed.
• Incoming links from high-ranking pages are better.
• Site Age - Old shows stability.
• Site Directory - Tree Structure.
• Complete - keywords in anchor text.
• PAGE METRICS - USER BEHAVIOR:
o Page traffic: trend of number of visitors.
o CTR: how often is the page clicked on.
o Time spent on page: Relatively long time, indicates relevance hit.
o If your website pages are bookmarked by user it is good for you.
• SITE METRICS- USER BEHAVIOR
o Site traffic: number of visitors are more its better.
o Time spent on domain: relatively long time indicates relevance hit.
• DOMAIN OWNER BEHAVIOR :
o Domain Registration Time: Register for 5 years, Google knows you are serious, register for 1 year, is it a throw-away domain?

NEGATIVE OFF-Page SEO Google Ranking Factors
• Traffic Buying is not suggested
• Old links are valued, new links are not.
• Zero links to you: You MUST have at least 1 (one) incoming link (back link) from some website somewhere, that Google is aware of, to REMAIN in the index.
• Google hates link-buying, because it corrupts their PR model in the worst way possible. Please check all these points before creating links:
1. Does your page have links it really doesn't merit?
2. Did you get tons of links in a short time period?
3. Do you have links from high-PR, unrelated sites?
• Cloaking (practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines.) should be avoided as Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.
• Links from bad neighborhoods: Google says that incoming links from bad sites can't hurt you, because you can't control them.

So we can say that the page rank is the function of page,
• Strong on page gives better page rank and strong off page is added advantage
• If off page is very strong and on page is bad then page rank will be very poor
• If on page is strong and off page is poor, then PR will not be that badly affected