The 7 Mistakes Search Engine Optimizers Make – Part 1

The 7 Mistakes Search Engine Optimizers Make – Part 1

Failure to make sites that are fully spiderable.

Web masters spend a great deal of time carefully optimizing their home page,
tweaking the keyword density, the meta tags, making sure that they have all of
the so called proper on page factors just right.

And there it stops.  The internal pages of a site end up getting treated like so
many red-headed step children – just hanging there in cyberspace with little
regard for their own Search Marketing Factors.

This is a killer mistake.  One of your primary goals as a web master is to ensure
that if you're selling a product, you're able to have your site found when people
are looking for that product.

Now, one of the most common mistakes a web master makes is Optimizing their home
page for too many keywords.  They think that they can cause their home page to be
ranked well for all of their products or keyword phrases.

And that's just not true.

So, what's the key to having your site rank well for a variety of different
search terms?

Notice that I said "Your Site"?

The key is to make your site full accessible to a search engine spider.

You see, Google and Yahoo! rank pages – not sites.  Ah HA!

That means that, all things being equal, any one page in your web site has the
ability to rank well.

Now, your home page will usually rank better for a given keyword than an interior
page (and there's a reason for this), but if you structure your site the correct
way, any interior page of your site has a fantastic opportunity to rank for a
very specific keyword or keyword phrase.

That's why you need to treat each page as a Search Engine Optimization
Opportunity.

Make sure you spend time optimizing for every page in your site.  If you're
having trouble ranking for a particular keyword, write an article or newsletter
that uses that keyword as the subject, throw it onto your site and --- MAKE SURE
THAT IT CAN BE CRAWLED!!

That's SO very important.  You need to make sure that all of the pages in your
site are able to be accessed from the home page.  You see, most of the time, a
Search Engine Spider will enter your site from your home page.  There, it will
begin to crawl through your site via the links it finds there. If one of your
interior pages can't be accessed from the home page, it could take a long time,
or maybe even never, for the spider to find that page.

The moral of the story?  You can't cause your home page to rank well for more
than 2 or 3 specific keyword or keyword phrases.  In order to place in the SERPS
for a number of different terms, you need to rely on other pages in your site
that are optimized (both on page and off) for those alternative keywords.

And the best way to ensure that those pages have a fighting chance at finding
their way onto the first  pages in Google or Yahoo!? – make sure that your site
is structured so that a spider can find just about every page in your site from
links on the home page.

Finding that difficult to do?

In the next chapter, we'll talk about using a Site Map to help the Search Engine
Spiders find their way to the pages you want them to.

*TEST*  To quickly check and see how many pages of your site have been indexed by
Google, go to the normal Google search box and search as follows:

site:yourdomain.com

This will tell you at a glance not only how many of your pages have been crawled
by Googlebot (Google's spider which shows up in your server logs), but more
importantly, it shows you how many pages have been actually indexed.

In the coming lessons will talk about mistakes to avoid in order to get high
rankings, but Step One is to make sure each page of your site can get crawled and
indexed.  And remember, use the interior pages to rank for all your relevant
keyword phrases – it's not all about the home page.

Check out Stomping the Search Engines at www.instantseoexpert.com/index3.html and
see how you can get YOUR site indexed in 48 hours!

Johan Setiawan
http://InternetMarketer.SuccessUniversity.com