Top 10 Search Engine Positioning
Mistakes (cont'd)
5) Using Hidden Text
Hidden text is text with the same color as the background color of
your page. For example, if the background color of your page is
white and you have added some white text to that page, that is
considered as hidden text. Many webmasters, in order to get high
rankings in the search engines, try to make their pages as keyword
rich as possible. However, there is a limit to the number of
keywords you can repeat in a page without making it sound odd to
your human visitors. Thus, in order to ensure that the human
visitors to a page don't perceive the text to be odd, but that the
page is still keyword rich, many webmasters add text (containing the
keywords) with the same color as the background color. This ensures
that while the search engines can see the keywords, the human
visitors cannot. The search engines have long since caught up with
this technique, and ignore or penalize the pages which contain such
text. They may also penalize the entire site if even one of the
pages in that site contain such hidden text.
However, the problem with this is that the search engines may often
end up penalizing sites which did not intend to use hidden text. For
instance, suppose you have a page with a white background and a
table in that page with a black background. Further suppose that you
have added some white text in that table. This text will, in fact,
be visible to your human visitors, i.e. this shouldn't be called
hidden text. However, the search engines can interpret this to be
hidden text because they may often ignore the fact that the
background of the table is black. Hence, in order to ensure that
your site is not penalized because of this, you should go through
all the pages in your site and see whether you have inadvertently
made any such mistake.
6) Creating Pages Containing Only Graphics
The search engines only understand text - they don't understand
graphics. Hence, if your site contains lots of graphics but little
text, it is unlikely to get a high ranking in the search engines.
For improving your rankings, you need to replace the graphics by
keyword rich text for the search engine spiders to feed on.
7) Not using the NOFRAMES tag in case your site uses frames
Many search engines don't understand frames. For sites which have
used frames, these search engines only consider what is present in
the NOFRAMES tag. Yet, many webmasters make the mistake of adding
something like this to the NOFRAMES tag: "This site uses frames, but
your browser doesn't support them". For the search engines which
don't understand frames, this is all the text that they ever get to
see in this site, which means that the chances of this site getting
a good ranking in these search engines are non-existent. Hence, if
your site uses frames, you need to add a lot of keyword rich text to
the NOFRAMES tag. For more information on the different issues that
arise when you use frames in your site, see my article on this topic
here.
http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?2139&frames.htm
8) Using Page Cloaking
Page cloaking is a technique used to deliver different web pages
under different circumstances. People generally use page cloaking
for two reasons: i) in order to hide the source code of their search
engine optimized pages from their competitors and ii) in order to
prevent human visitors from having to see a page which looks good to
the search engines but does not necessarily look good to humans. The
problem with this is that when a site uses cloaking, it prevents the
search engines from being able to spider the same page that their
users are going to see. And if the search engines can't do this,
they can no longer be confident of providing relevant results to
their users. Thus, if a search engine discovers that a site has used
cloaking, it will probably ban the site forever from their index.
Hence, my advice is that you should not even think about using
cloaking in your site. For more information on what page cloaking
is, how it is implemented, and why you should not use cloaking, see
my article on this topic here.
http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?2139&page-cloaking.htm
Go to
Page:
1
|
2
|
3
<--Back
to Article Index