9
Jun
Bad SEO ideas for Estate Agents
Search Engine Optimisation is a very complicated
thing for many reasons. It’s not like there is a general
right or wrong answer, you have to experiment to see what works for
your website and just because one thing will work for a website
doesn’t mean doing exactly the same thing for another website
will work.
Google’s algorithm takes around 200 factors into account
when ranking a website. Adding to this problem Search Engines are
very disclosed about giving out information on their algorithms.
The main reason for this being that they don’t want their
competition to know what they are doing and the other being they
don’t want spammers to design websites to get a better
ranking then they deserve.
Obviously Google gives you clues on how to rank well and testing
helps see exactly what works and what doesn’t but as I say
its not a question about just being right or wrong as there are so
many more elements that go into it.
Another reason Search Engine optimisation is complicated is
that it changes all the time, even on a day to day basis. What
worked last month might not work this month. The SEO environment is
a forever changing complex environment and rapid changes have led
to SEO myths.
So here we have stated the SEO tips and trick that just
don’t work -
1. Meta Tags - Coming in at number one is
thinking Meta tags carry any weight in terms of SEO. This technique
was abandoned years ago as it was easy to lie about keywords.
Spammers abused this system so bad it had to be discarded. Search
engines near enough completely rely on content that is visible to
users. Anything hidden away will not help with your ranking.
The one Meta tag that shouldn’t be forgotten about though
is your Meta Description tag. Although it doesn’t have an
affect on your ranking, it can be used on Search Engines to
describe your website in a few words.
2. Keyword Stuffing invisible text – a
bit of an old skool technique that these days can get your website
banned! This can be anything from writing in the same colour as the
background to things that are written way off the visible page.
This is picked up very easily these days by Search Engines so
isn’t even worth risking getting your website banned because
of it.
3. Buying Links – another one of those
techniques that took off and is still very popular. Mainly because
some websites can get away with and of course it can help with
their rankings. Although this is a dying technique as all Search
Engines have made it in their interest to defeat this practice and
are working hard to do so.
If they do detect a purchased link they will flag it and make it
completely useless. If they detect you are purchasing links for
ranking purposes only they can and do, ban websites.
4. Swapping Links – Search Engines want
links to represent reliability and usefulness. If a highly thought
of website links to you (that is in the same business or related
business to you), Google will see your website as a more
reliable/trustworthy source.
Swapping links is just for the sack of trying to improve page
rank and search ranking is a completely waste of time. And if the
websites aren’t relevant to your business you can be ranked
badly for it.
Google wants you to gain links organically not by trading really
but if you do want to trade links make sure you swap them with
websites that are highly relevant to your business and only link to
them if they would be valuable to your website. If they
aren’t a reliable website it could have a bad effect rather
then good.
5. Duplicate Content – this can be done
in two different ways
- The purposeful way in which two or more websites used the same
or similar content in order to advertise their business in to
different ways so that they can pursue different methods of
marketing their products or services.
- The other being the accidental way, many sites have multiple
routes to the same content but the content is delivered on
different URL’s.
Search Engines want to rank the same content only once, Search
Engines will only acknowledge one of the pages although page rank
will be being leaked to pages that will never rank.
6. Using a completely Flash website –
Flash is one of those things that can make a website look very cool
and pretty. And Search Engines can read and index some flash but
you will struggle to rank well on competitive terms.
This is simply because Search Engines love content. Usually if a
website is completely flash and competing again a website that has
a lot of content, the website with content will come out on
top.
Another reason flash websites can be bad is that Google, in the
last few months, has said that speed is now a factor in ranking.
The faster the website is the better. Flash can take a while to
load up, bringing its scoring down.
7. Cloaking – This is showing different
content to the crawlers then you are showing to the user. This is
hugely frowned upon by Search Engines and if a Search Engine
detects that your website is cloaking, there is a great chance your
website will be banned even if your intent wasn’t bad.
With all this in mind, you should be able to keep yourselves out
of trouble with the Search Engines.
By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant
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