Some of the alleged top Google listing tips, tricks, and services are just flat out wrong, misleading, and can be harmful to your online business. If you really want to increase targeted traffic to your website, you should ignore the following SEO advice…

What to Avoid and Ignore When Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines

1. Hiding lists of links on your page to be picked up by web crawlers.

Google looks for keywords in specific areas on the page. Mainly in the title and within the content itself. Listing a bunch of keywords somewhere outside the content, especially in a way that cannot be seen by visitors, won’t help you and might even get your website penalized. Tags being an exception.

If it doesn’t read like a decently formatted narrative, then the web crawlers probably won’t think it is either. That’s what they’re designed to do - decipher which webpages contain the information to help people typing in queries in their search engine to get to what they’re looking for.

2. Believing that filling your meta tags with keywords will help you.

Don’t be naive enough to think that you can tell the search engines what your webpage is about, which is what many meta tags do. Google and the other engines don’t even use them to determine page ranking anymore (Google never did), and so it’s already an obsolete method. Google also uses the text around keywords in the content to determine the page descriptions, so its not necessary to include. However, if you want a more standard description for search engines, you can still use the description meta tag and Google will pick it up to be displayed in listings.

3. Using link exchanges to create backlinks.

It’s true that inbound links from other webpages greatly enhance your high page rank probability, but only if they’re from related sources. Google won’t consider a link back from a website about hiking as reliable if your website is about role-playing games.

The web crawlers have gotten good at cross-referencing content and they know the difference between an apple and an orange.

People will usually only go to related links as well, so most people visiting the site giving you the link will not visit you anyway.

4. Trying to rank for keywords that are not related to the content on your page.

Just because you use the keywords, doesn’t mean you’re going to get ranked for them, especially if your page talks about something completely different. Just like the engines cross-reference between websites, they also cross-reference within topics. If you tried to place keywords for “American literature during World War II” to be picked up and the page really discusses “How YouTube became popular,” your page will probably just get buried in the depths of cyberspace.

Again, even by chance you do rank for the term, once people see your site does not match their search, they will either not click on it, or immediately leave the website once the land on the first page.

5. Falling for schemes that will submit your website to “thousands” of search engines and directories.

There are only a handful of search engines out there and anything else is most likely already controlled by Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or Ask. The first three comprise of almost 100% of the searches on the Internet. The web crawlers for these search engines are also very efficient at what they do, so as long as you’re already linked in to the Internet (have at least one inbound link) and made your pages accessible to visitors, your website will get indexed (listed) anyway. You don’t need to submit to anyone, let alone pay for it.

6. Falling for schemes that guarantee or promise number 1 spots on search engines.

There’s much you can control to get ranked - keywords, optimizing your website for crawlers, content, and some inbound links. There’s much you cannot control as well  - inbound links of competing websites and pages, the strength and popularity of the competitor’s domain, and the age of pages to name a few. In the end, the only people who know exactly how the web crawlers operate are the web crawling programmers. There’s countless variables used to determine page rankings that we just don’t know about, so no one can guarantee or promise high rankings. At the very least, a good SEO specialist can give your pages a higher probability of being ranked on the first page, but not much more.

Start thinking organic and natural.

If you come across anything that sounds like it’s a cheat, a work-around, like it’s trying to pull one over the web crawlers and trick them into getting your page ranked, then it’s probably a bad idea. It won’t work and the search engines might even punish your page for the attempt to fool them.

You need to start thinking organically, thinking how your page would succeed naturally.

Make sure you always…

• Write content on pages that bring real value and useful information to your visitors.
• Use keywords that relate directly to your subject matter.
• Get links from websites in your own market or field and hope that others will also find your information worthy for them to share with others.
• Stay away from SEO specialists and consultants that tell you to use any of the methods to avoid mentioned here. Trust your gut on their advice and don’t be afraid to get a second opinion.

The search engines want to find your useful information and pages to share with the world. Start writing about what you know best and format it the best and most accessible way you can and you’ll already be ahead of most of the game ]]> http://warrensamu.com/google-listing-tips/feed/ 9