Online marketers may have the best of intentions with their natural search engine optimization programs. Yet, they drop the ball with their impatience and eagerness to try the latest tricks and fads.
For example, you may know that choosing the right keywords and blending them with the visible text is a critical step. Even if you do this well you may still squelch your effort by going overboard in other ways. Here are five areas where you should tread lightly with SEO:
1. Long Page Titles
Stick with one, two or three search terms with 70 or so characters as your cap. Dont make the mistake of cramming in a ton of words here.
2. META Descriptions
Strive for 12-15 words. If you go over, it wont hurt. You will counteract your other optimization efforts by creating a META description monstrosity loaded with too many keywords.
3. Image Alt Tags
Dont have a field day with alt tags. Often, a web site has many graphics and each could feature an alt tag. Stay away from the temptation to keep repeating your keywords and search phrases in the image source code.
4. Link Title Attribute
Desperate for any edge they can get, some online marketers have discovered ways to pack too many keywords in the source code. Yes, you can identify a link (the words appear when you hover over the link), but what can you really expect to achieve by filling up the link title attribute tag
5. Domain, Folder and Page Names
Yes, including a keyword in a domain, folder name and page name can help. But it can also look like spam to the search engines and leave the wrong impression on visitors. Do you really want a hideous URL with three hyphens in the domain name, several more in the folder name and three others in the page name
Your best bet is to stick with the basics effective page titles and META descriptions (and maybe a few keywords in the keyword META tag). Besides that, focus on good content with search terms spread throughout the page (with some keywords linked to related content on the site). Finally, support these efforts with a robust link building program (getting links to your site from quality web sites).
Slow down. Pace yourself. And be careful what you read in the forums and hear from your friends. Before you do anything off the normal SEO path, you need to be very confident about your choices and their implications.
If you go at a steady pace and test your rankings as you try proven techniques, youll increase your odds of success.
Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, an Ohio-based search engine marketing firm. He recently presented SEO Overkill at the national Search Engine Strategies conference. Fathom SEO is a member of the Better Business Bureau in Cleveland, SEMPO, SEO Consultants and OSEOP. Visit our site for our SEO white papers and recent SEO studies on the manufacturing and health care industries.
You know search engines evaluate a site based primarily on the links going to it (inbound links). The PageRank of the sites on which the inbound links are located, and the anchor text of the links, matter a lot. But if youre like most webmasters, you dont appreciate the value of outbound links.
Outbound Link Relevance & Anchor Text
The clearest way that outbound links can affect SEO is through their anchor text.
Outbound links anchor text affects a pages search engine ranking in much the same way that inbound links anchor text affects search engine ranking. Anchor text of inbound links is arguably the most important factor in search engine rankings for particular keywords. For instance, if fuzzy keyword is in the anchor text of a link to a webpage, that webpage may well appear in SERPs for fuzzy keyword even if neither the word fuzzy nor keyword appears anywhere on your site.
Outbound links anchor text works the same way, though it is slightly less powerful. If you have a particular keyword in the anchor text of a link on a webpage, that webpage will likely show up in search engine results--even if it appears nowhere else on the page, and even if there are no inbound links with that anchor text.
Dont believe me Look at your web traffic logs. Check out the search engine traffic to specific pages. Youll likely see plenty of instances of the page getting traffic for search strings that appear nowhere else on the page but in the anchor text of outbound links.
One example from a site I own is on endometrialcancer.org, a project devoted to provided information about a disease. There are separate pages for symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, and other aspects of the disease. Strikingly, one page my rank highly for another pages target keyword, if it links to the other page with the target keyword in its anchor text. For instance, the diagnosis page may outrank the symptoms page for the keyword endometrial cancer symptoms, merely because the diagnosis page has that keyword in the anchor text of its link to the symptoms page.
How to shoot yourself in the foot with outbound link anchor text relevance:
There are four main ways to shoot yourself in the foot by mishandling outbound links anchor text:
After all, they call it the web because the links go both in and out, tying sites together like nodes of spider silk. If links were only meant to flow one way, theyd just call it the chain.
Dont chain your website down. Start sharing the links.
About the author: Joel Walsh writes prolifically on SEO articles.
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