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The Alt Tag is meant to be a textual description of image it is attached to. There is nothing wrong with tailoring Alt tag to meet your keyword goals IF tag is still understandable and if it appropriately describes image. The offence occurs when an Alt tag has obvious keyword repetition/filler that a search engine can key in on as spam.
7: Comment Tag Stuffing Comment Tags are used to include useful design comments in background source code (html) when creating a web page. These tags should be used only for adding technical instructions or reminders; however, these tags were often used to artificially increase keyword count for particular search phrases.
At one time there was some argument that this technique worked, but it has always been a "Black Hat" search engine optimisation technique that even then could result in placement penalties. Nowadays this technique will not help an optimisation campaign, if anything it will be ignored or produce a negative result.
8: Over Reliance on Meta Tags Meta Tags is a broad term for descriptive tags that appear in most web pages and are used to provide search engines with a concept of page topic. The most common tags are description and keyword tags.
At one time, extinct search engines such as Infoseek relied a great deal on Meta Tags and many took advantage of this factor to manipulate rankings with relative ease. In today's far more advanced climate search engines place cautious weight on Meta Tags and when considering rankings Metas play only a fractional role. Some webmasters still consider Meta Tags ‘end-all and be-all' of ranking producers and forget to optimise rest of their web page for search engines. With this line of thinking they miss that search engines place far more importance on body text (or visible text) of web page. This is a critical error that will ultimately lead to low or insignificant rankings.
Note: An extremely common example of Meta Tag over-reliance are web sites that have been designed totally graphically and are devoid (or nearly so) of html text that a search engine can read. A web page such as this will have no body text to index and may only provide a small amount of relevance to web page which ultimately leads to poor rankings.
Over reliance on Meta Tags does not produce intentional search engine penalties, however, simple act of ignoring other ranking principles often means a lower ranking.
For more detailed information on how to use all Tags more effectively, download our book “Start at Beginning” here: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_2.html
9: Duplicate Content This tactic is blatant Spam and is very common today. Essentially Webmaster will create a web site and then create duplicates of each page and optimise them differently in order to obtain varying placements. By doing this you are saturating search engine databases with content that is essentially eating valuable bandwidth and hard drive space.
Duplicate content is a dangerous game often played by full-time marketers accustomed to trying to attain placements in aggressive markets. Avoid this tactic like plague unless you are willing to sustain serious ranking damages if you get caught - which you likely will.
10: Automatic Submission Automatic Submission is use of automated software to submit a website to search engines automatically and often repeatedly.
At Enable UK word ‘automated' is a disturbing when used in reference to search engine optimisation and submission. The fact is that automated campaigns are not as effective as manual (by hand) ones.
Automatic Submission Tools can only submit to search engines that allow such submissions. These search engines make majority of their profit from surfers like you viewing their advertising, be this at their web site or by emails you will receive as a result of submitting to them. Automated tools have also been known to repeatedly submit sites and sometimes each individual page within a site and if a search engine is submitted to too often it will consider submission as Spam and website being submitted will not fair well.
The more established and popular search engines do not allow automated submissions, in fact submission companies continually try to upgrade their software to try and subvert search engines' latest effort to stop their programs.
All in all, this leaves submitter in an unstable position where they may or may not have their submission ignored. The cardinal rule of search engines… submit ONCE and it may take a while (usually no more than 2 or 3 months) but site will get spidered at some point. If within a few months a site is not listed, then resubmit. As for major engines like Google… be patient and definitely don't submit more than once if you can help it.
I hope that this article has told you a lot of things you already know and that you have not already fallen into any of these traps. If you are intending to outsource your Internet marketing campaigns, be extremely wary of any search engine optimisation company that suggests any of these tactics. Some of these tactics may work in short term; however, that outcome is not only rare it is also a great way to get banned from major search engines completely.
For detailed information on how to optimise your web site effectively, without upsetting search engines, download our guide “Start at Beginning” here: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_2.html
Is your web site driving high quality, targeted customers to your business? Our proven Internet Marketing solutions make your web site work harder for you. For a complete range of Internet marketing and advertising resources to improve search engine positions visit Enable UK. Stop losing customers to your competitors and make more money from your web site TODAY. www.enable-uk.co.uk