eMarketing Sabotage - Top 10 Steps To Kill Your Search Engine Marketing Practices

We at America Web Works find ourselves amazed at the amountof effort people spend trying to fool or manipulate theirpositioning in search engines. People seem to focus on theshortcuts to success and NOT on their Web site or the truevalue their content provides to their prospects.

In the spirit of educating marketers about best practices,we present this list of ten things you can do to sabotageyour search engine marketing project in a "New York" second.

1. Invisible (Ghost) Text

You have kept a good secret! Your visitors might not havenoticed, but all search engine crawlers have been trained tobe on the lookout for this obvious technique, lastfashionable circa 1997. The search engines may very wellpurge all your pages from their index due to deceptivepractices.

And, if you are feeling really frisky, you can make thistechnique even more effective if the invisible text hasabsolutely nothing to do with the content of the page itsits within.

2. Frames Usage

Search engines are not "frame-friendly". Once theyencounter a pesky frame, they either stop flat in theirtracks because the frame doesn't give them anywhere else togo, or they locate the pages beyond the frames and pointpeople to that locale - which won't have the frames includedwith it.

There's truly no need to use frames and make attempt tojustify it by believing it will improve the prospect'sexperience.

If your prospects can't uncover your site or they findslices and slivers of you, how much then have you actuallyassisted them?

3. Why Be Fresh And Original?

Why try to be unique, it's just too hard anyway? It soundsfoolish, but it occurs quite often. If you find somethingof real interest on another site, just burning a copy andslapping your links on the top does not make you a uniqueforce on the Net. And how many actual shopping sitesselling the exact same discounted products are enough forthe average Web? In my book, the more sites you mirror, theleast effective you will become.

4. Chubby Web Pages (Obesity Kills)

Sites with lots of graphics, animation, Flash and music dopose many disruptive elements with the search engines. Not only can it confuse your prospects, who are looking forobvious information and links, the search engines may notfeel you are very relevant because they cannot be sure whatto make of your Web site.

If you have a site made up of nothing but heavy graphics andmultimedia, not only will you give the search engines zeroto index, you may also aggravate any prospect running with aslower connection speed. In nothing else, at the least, useALT-tags to explain images for text browsers, the hearingimpaired and search engines.

5. Redirects, Redirects, And More Redirects

You may be using "redirects" within your Web pages to trackclicks for advertising and also to pull together informationabout your site visitors. Your Web pages may be indexed,but you may not rank well at all. The search engines may notbe able to see the correlation that exist between your Webpages because the redirect code often blocks their path,unlike direct text linkage.

6. Lengthy URL's

Dynamic (ever-changing) e-commerce and shopping Web sitesthat use parameters and their session ID's often manifestthese difficult URL's nicely.

If your Web site has lengthy URL's sprinkled with questionmarks, percentage signs, Session ID's, and at least threeparameters, you're degrading your hopes for search enginesuperiority.

Lengthy URL's do not look very attractive to individualssearching and the site URL's contain calls to variousdatabases.

Leading the way for the search crawler directly into yourdatabase may quite possibly be a sure-fire way to send themspidering elsewhere.

7. Forgotten about your No Index Tag and Robots.txt?

Have you created a plan to keep all those nasty search botsout? Do you have a robots.txt file living on the root ofyour site? Does this file contain the following:

User-agent: *disallow /

Or does your Web property have a Meta-tag:

Be extra nice to your Webmaster. He or she may depart fromyour company in the future and leave this little monsterbehind for you to find at the end of a needlessly expensiveinvestigation into why the search engines will not make nicewith your Web site.

If you are using the special robots protocol, you will notwant to forget to remove them altogether if you are goinglive from a beta testing process.

8. Doorway Pages

Doorway pages (also know as jump pages and bridge pages) andanything that is created specifically for a search engineand does not contain more than valuable content or productsfor your prospect, is not an effective search marketingtool.

If you're not providing true content, the search engineswill discover this and may penalize your entire online site. If you've jammed yourself into this hole, you'll probablyneed to return back to start with a new domain name.

9. Identical Meta-Tags And Titles

You worried over every single unique page of the Webproperty while developing it, but you didn't spend a lot ofconcern that each page should be tagged (or classified) thatway.

Imagine walking into your public library where every singlebook had the exact same title. What better way to tell asearch bot to "take a hike" than showing them that all ofyour content is exactly the same. You will most likely seefewer of your Web pages indexed and much less traffic thanyou might otherwise.

Here's a quick checklist to consider for your Meta-Tags andTitles:

* Do they deliver a "call to action"?

* Do they use relevant keywords and phrases?

* Is your "Title" less than 80 characters?

* Do they accurately describe what the page is about?

* Are these consistent with the page?

Free Meta-Tag Builder:
http://www.americawebworks.com/metatagplus/

(Be sure to bookmark that link!)

10. Linking Networks

Did you find a service that's offering to link thousands ofother Web sites to you today? Taking part in these programsmay effectively indicate to the search engines that youreally do not want their valuable traffic. The quality ofthese link pages as well as their overall content "value" toa human visitor is very low.

Most search engines do come together in agreement and canseverely penalize accordingly. Sites that get marked aslink spammers, may be briskly informed that they should finda new domain name and begin all over again.

I advise you to take these lessons in "eMarketing Sabotage"for what they are, guidelines to help you operate your goode-business practice free and clear of the many pitfalls andmistakes of other marketers and improve on your own level ofsuccess in conjunction with search engines strategies.

Soon, with a sound plan, a bit of smart work and a solidattention-to-detail approach, your Web pages may rankhighest among today's top search engine results.

Happy Marketing!

About Tony Marino, Ph.D., Marketing

Dr. Tony Marino is not only the CEO of America Web Works, heis also the Founder of the http://www.AudioVideoStreams.com,the International ePublisher's Association, Christian TimeseBusiness Newsletter and the author of the ePublishingMaster's Course at: http://www.ePublisherUniversity.com.

He has also worked with the likes of Ted Nicholas, GaryHalbert, Armand Morin, Yanik Silver, Dale Calvert and JayAbraham, Mark Victor Hansen just to name a few. His officesare location in Portland and Los Angeles and he'd love tohear from you anytime!

http://www.AmericaWebWorks.com866-824-9684