Work From Home

Learn how to avoid common SEO mistakes that can end up getting your website banned from the search engines with these 5 simple SEO rules.

1. Use HTML Code.

Don't use too much JavaScript and Flash which might look better, but are harder read and indexed by searchbots. Search engine spiders are not designed to read and understand JavaScript or Flash. If a website contains a few lines of text in the JavaScript code search engine spiders might not index the whole page.

2. Validate Your HTML

Make sure your HTML code doesn't contain any errors. If it has errors, it is possible that only portions of your web pages are crawled and indexed by search engine spiders. Use a free HTML validator and correct your errors before submitting your site to search engines.

3. Use a Robots.txt File

With the help of a robots.txt file placed in the root folder of the website you can choose what pages to be indexed by search engines. A robots.txt file will prevent unwanted web pages from being indexed and displayed in search results.

4. Use Long Tail Keywords

There are so many websites competing for short tail keywords (like music, mp3, sport, iPod) so it can take quite a long time to rank in the top 20 for such a keyword. Long tail keywords contain more than 2 words and are easier to rank for. It would be much easier to rank for "rock mp3 downloads" instead of "mp3" or "downloads".

5. Link to High Quality Websites

Link building is the most important aspect of search engine optimization. Search engines calculate the popularity of a website by the number and quality of backlinks pointing to it. Many people mistakenly link to lots of low quality websites hoping they will get higher rankings. This tactic can cause them to be penalized by search engines and even get banned.