Seven Deadly Sins For Business Web Sites

• Not including Meta Tags in the header portion of each web page. You'd be surprised how many web sites do not contain Meta Keyword Tags in their headers. Often, the only way a customer can find a web site like this is to search for the business name itself.

  Meta Tags can be tweaked for each page in order to draw different searches to different pages. Once a visitor finds one page of your web site, a properly designed navigation bar will help them find the rest.

• Listing a keyword too frequently in a Meta Tag or page text. Some search engines blacklist sites that have too high a keyword density or which repeat a keyword too frequently in the Meta Keyword Tag.

  A good practice is not to use the same keyword more than three times in a Meta Keyword Tag. Also you should ensure that keyword density - the percent of your page text that is your keyword - does not exceed 15%.

• Listing keywords in the singular tense. Keywords listed in singular tense will only match keywords in the same tense. For example, the keyword "restaurant" will not be matched if a web user searches for "restaurants."

  Many sites include misspelled keywords in their Meta Tags in the hopes of luring web users who fumble the spelling of a search term. Clearly, if your keywords are commonly misspelled, including alternate spellings and misspellings of the term in your tags might attract additional traffic.

• Using same color text and background. When a dark picture or pattern covers a white background, black text often gets changed to white. However, unless the out of sight background color is also changed, your business web site could be dropped from search engines.

  Same color text and background, used for years to seed sites with text visible only to search engines, can get your site blacklisted. Even if visitors can clearly read your text and even if your web designer accidentally changed your text to be the same color as your background, search engines are no longer color blind and could take offense at same color text and background.

• Not submitting your site to search engines. While some search engines routinely send out "spiders" to crawl the web and may come across your web site even if you don't submit it for indexing, the majority of search engines need to be told about even the best of sites. While this is something you can do yourself, web designers should have access to software that can instantly register you with numerous search engines. The more search engines that know about your web site, the better as additional listings may get you better ranking in all search engines. Make sure your web site gets submitted to at least the major search engines.
• Submitting your site to search engines too often. Inexperienced web designers, and many do it yourselfers, submit their sites to search engines immediately after making changes in an effort to improve their ranking. However, this can sometimes backfire because some search engines will drop your listing if you submit too frequently. A good practice is to wait at least 30 days before resubmitting your web site.
• Not being linked to from other web sites. No one knows exactly what formula or algorithm search engines use to rank sites in their results. However, evidence suggests that many search engines rank web sites not only by content and tags, but also by the number of links to them.

  As a political experiment, several bloggers recently asked their readers to put links on their web pages linking the phrase "miserable failure" to George W. Bush's biography on the White House servers. After thousands of readers complied, President Bush's biography, which certainly did not contain relevant meta tags or content, became the first ranked result for miserable failure on many a search engine.

  Since the original experiment, the same technique was used by different groups to get high rankings of biographies or home pages for former President Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore also for the term "miserable failure".

  Regardless of your political leanings, this experiment deftly demonstrates the importance of links to search engine ranking. Often, links to your web site can be had for free if you will provide a reciprocal link back to the site that links to your site. The most valuable of links are those on other similarly themed sites that could bring potential customers who locate them to your site.

  For example, if you own a restaurant, a link from a restaurant guide web site is more valuable to you than a link from a blog because it is reasonable to assume that visitors to a restaurant guide are looking for a restaurant. Therefore it makes sense to ensure your customers can find you by providing reciprocal links to other relevant business sites.