Welcome to

When optimizing your web site, there are many things that you should avoid if you don’t want your page to get devalued within the search engines. You’re looking to raise your status and your rank of your site, not upset the search engines by making small mistakes that can be easily remedied. If you make enough mistakes, your site could fall in its rankings or worse yet, get delisted all together within the search engines. So it is important to know what to avoid while optimizing your website for search engine rankings.

First, text in your graphics

It is often recommended that you use a descriptive term within each of your images. What I mean by that is that you place words related to the photo within your images alt tags. While this is perfectly legal, you need to be very careful when doing so. An illegal technique is to place lots and lots of keywords related to your topic within each alt tag. This is considered “keyword spamming” and is frowned upon by nearly every relevant search engine online. When you do use words within your images alt tags, use them in a way that is helpful. Typically these words and phrases are used in order to describe the image in the event the image does not load on your page. So if you’ve created a web page about “flowers” and you have multiple images on your page relating to flowers, it should specifically describe that image. For example, “flowers button image”.

Moving a page having a PR

If you decide to “fix up” or “enhance” your website, you may end up moving some high ranking web pages. These are pages that have already been indexed in the search engines and that have received a decent amount of PageRank. If you do move a page that’s already received good rankings or a high PageRank, and the search engine pays a visit, it will not be able to locate that page and it will then end up losing whatever ranking it had. Try to avoid this at all costs.

Dead ends

Every last page on your site needs a link to another page somewhere. Whether this be on your own site or to someone else’s site. You must give your site visitor a way to leave your web page if they desire. Not offering this option can be very detrimenal to your website as a whole.

Artificially increase a page’s keyword density

If you decide to follow someone who is not very well-versed in proper SEO techniques, you may inadvertently end up following some advice that will hurt you more than help you. One example is that of filling your web pages with keywords related to the topic of your site. This is considered keyword stuffing and will get you penalized and quite possibly banned when it comes to the search engines.

Using hidden text or links

Another piece of advice that might be followed by those unfamiliar with proper SEO techniques is that of hiding links from view. If you’ve ever been instructed to place text on your site that is the same color as your background, thus rendering it invisible to readers, you need to fix that right now. The search engines will penalize you for such a tactic. Additionally, you should never place an image on your site that hides a link. This too will result in penalties and possible banning in the search engines.

Links from link farms and non-relevant sites

Link farms are sites that exist online whose sole purpose is to provides links to other sites. These are also often called FFA or Free For All sites. The best when it comes to getting links to your site is to get links from places that don’t already have a lot of them.

And lastly, don’t use the same text for all of your incoming links. If all of the links that point to your site have the same link text, it sets off red flags for the search engines. Links that contain varying related terms that link to your site are best, they look more natural and thus will not be viewed as something to be concerned with when the search engines come to visit.

This should have already been drilled into your head if you’ve been online for some time but in the event it hasn’t…

Write keyword-rich articles for your site as well as article directories

It’s extremely important that when you write content for your website that you make sure it focuses on one or two main keywords per article. This is also true if you are writing articles to submit to ezine directories.

If you’re unsure of how to start writing a keyword-rich article, here’s a great way to start…

Two of my favorite places to get keywords that people are searching for right now are A) Keyword Discovery and B) Wordtracker.

While both of these sites provide paid versions, their free versions are good for those who are just starting out. As your site evolves, you’ll want to invest in the paid versions of either one of these programs as they’ll give you tons of information you can use that you don’t get for free.

If you head on over to one of these services and enter in a generic one-word phrase about your topic, you will then be presented with an entire list of phrases that people are using right now in order to find the kind of product or service you offer.

Pick one of these phrases and start to write an article about it. Keep your article around 300-750 words, and place the main keyword or phrase your referring to in your title. You’ll also want to scatter this phrase (and variations of it) throughout your article. Oftentimes this will happen naturally which is exactly how you want the article to read. Natural.

If you don’t want to take the time out to do all of this work, consider outsourcing it and hiring someone like a Virtual Assistant or a freelance writer to do it for you.

Additionally, you can flat out purchase keyword-rich articles through sites that offer these kinds of services. The only downside is that you can’t choose the topic. If you intend on creating many websites on various different topics in order to create affiliate income or AdSense income for yourself, these kinds of services are absolutely ideal.

One of my favorites by far is InfoGoRound

Search engine optimization is one of the best ways you can use to get your website ranked highly in the search engines. To get the most out of your efforts, you need a well optimized site that will bring in lots of visitors for you but if you’ve ever taken the time to check out the prices of some of the larger SEO firms, the costs can range in the thousands of dollars.

Thankfully you can get information about how to optimize your website yourself from many places on the Internet, one of them right here at SlingBrain.com. Here’s a few that can get you started right away. (For free I might add).

1. Exchanging Links. While this used to be a big favorite amongst a lot of online marketers, it’s not as important as it used to be thanks to some well-known search engines penalizing sites that went over the top with this technique. That being said, there are still benefits to exchanging links with other websites in order to help your page ranking. You just need to follow a few guidelines first.

First, be sure that the website you want to exchange links with hasn’t been barred by the search engines. You’d be surprised how many people overlook this simple but very important step. You can do this by heading over to Google and in the address bar entering site:www.thesiteyourconsidering.com. If nothing shows up, they’ve been blacklisted so don’t even think of trading links with them. You’ll go downhill faster than a snowball on ice.

Second, be sure that the website you’re exchanging links with is on a related topic as yours. You don’t want to trade links with a site about Pizza if your site is about flowers.

Third, keep the link trading at a minimum. Be sure you’ve got some natural incoming links as well that aren’t requiring a link back to you. You need to keep the two balanced out.

Fourth, be sure that the page you want to link to has a PageRank. Obviously the higher the better, but any kind of PageRank means that they’ve been around for some time; at least long enough for Google to know that they’re online.

Fifth, don’t be shy. Find out who is listed in the top 10 of Google or Yahoo and simply ask if they’d be willing to exchange links with you. I don’t recommend you doing this until you’ve had your site up for quite some time, and have plenty of good, relevant content on it. You don’t want to be spamming these sites either. Send a simple and polite request to the webmaster, if they don’t respond in a week or so, then wait and do it again in another month.