Must to Avoid Actions by Webmasters

Most probably the only reason, you are reading this page, is that you are a webmaster who is interested in knowing about latest tricks and practices in search engine optimization to increase the traffic to the sites. Proper optimization practices don’t only include “what to do”, but also as well “what not to do. In today’s article, contributed by Ms Soniya, Head IT department in St Mary institute of technology, Kamloops, Canada, she discusses few points about what DEFINITELY NOT TO DO, for webmasters while optimizing the site. As Ms soniya, goes on to advise about various “Not to do for optimization”, crux of the matter boils only to this factor that a webmaster is not to get desperate to get higher traffic using ulterior means as it might get him banned and give him no second chance of reviving the site.

First and foremost; before start of optimizing a site, list out keywords for your target audience. Quite often the keywords that you think are good are not searched by audience across the globe. In any case, it would be a better idea to research the keywords on overture or Google and most probably you would need to change some of the keywords depending upon the number of times a particular keyword is searched. Needless to say, Better keywords translate into better transactions.
Next but equally important, is to avoid spamming in any ways. Spamming can not only get you low rankings in search engine results but as well as lower rankings of your server as well in a way that all mails from your servers for most of reputed email providers could land into Junk or Bulk mail category instead of main Inbox. Search engines now a days are too smart to fail in detecting spams. One common method of spamming a search engine is to stuff lot of keywords in the page in the color of the background. Idea would be give high keyword density to search engines so as to result higher in search engines. Though, for past two years or more, I am noticing that search engines have started penalizing such sites, still I feel surprised to see some sites still indulging in such practices. Most engines can detect this spam.
Another way of spamming search engines is using meta fresh on your page to direct the visitor to another page. For this, an page, optimized on certain terms is made which is made to rank high on search engines. After the visitor lands on this page, he is taken to another page using meta fresh. I wont discuss this more as this technique also is on its way out and experienced webmasters are not known to use it. Another common spam method is to use similar domain names with identical content so as to increase overall visitor count on all the sites.
Among the worst blunders to commit is to add multiple pages of same content on your site or copying your content in many sites or worse still copying content from other web sites to your sites. Be sure to get penalized by search engines for this and if complained to registrar, may even lead to banning of your domain / website. Some more innovative webmasters show a different page to search engines by detecting their ip and take visitor to a different page depending upon his country of login. This too is now days detected by search engines and penalized.
Avoid excessive Headline markup. It is true that search engines give higher ranking to bold, headline or colored text and same is treated as a sort of teaser by search engines. It is not to advise that don’t do this, but to do the same in moderation. Excessive coloring or use of or other attributes, beyond the use of balanced markers annoy search engines.
Other don’ts.
Keep the index of your site simple and not to make this too complex for a search engine spider to understand. Not to use too much of a flash in your site. laymen may tend to like graphics made on flash for your site, but search engines don’t seem to read anything in flash. If you are aiming to get your traffic based on search engine results, forget flash or have minimal use of it, if at all. Avoid use of frames in your site. having frames can block deep crawl of your site by search engine.
Offering content for which login is must also deters search engines. Try to have good content that does not need login. Have navigation or site map of your site and submit the same to leading search engines. Optimizing a site having less content also does not take you anywhere. Avoid use of session ids and use cookies instead. Session id is the one that is allocated to you by server each time you log in and is different each time. A search engine spider will each time consider the same as a separate url and thus for a search engine spider your site has multiple copies of same content on your site and result is plain….penalizing the site.
Lastly, my advise would be to understand that search engine optimization is not one time job. Search engines are constantly evolving in the algorithm and so is webplace changing every day. A thing which is in-thing for the day may be no-no for tomorrow, so keep your self abreast with latest strategies for optimization.