10 Things That Lower Search Engine Ranking

© 2005 – 2008
610 Words

So, you’ve finished building your website and now you need to submit it to the search engines. When your website is established and you submit the web address to the search engine such as Google, HotBot, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Yahoo, and MSN, you are then able to place keywords for your website.

Some major things to avoid when trying to rank high on a search engine, is creating link farms. Link farms are multiple doorways that exist only to multiply the number of links that are pointing to their websites. These links are not rich with content, but include a string of keyword terms that would earn them a high ranking with those search engines.

Beware of irrelevant links as well. You should however have a lot of different links that point to your website, but only if they are relevant to what your website represents. If the search engine finds links that are irrelevant to your website, they will lower your relevancy rating giving you a low ranking on the search engine.

Also beware of irrelevant keywords. When a search engine finds that there are keywords that have nothing to do with your website, they treat it just as they would for irrelevant links and lower your ranking. If you choose keywords that have a too high rate of competition, it will be nearly impossible to get ranked high.

Don’t “keyword stuff” your meta tags. What exactly does that mean, you might ask? It simply means that the keyword is used over and over in their meta tags. In the past, this gave websites a high ranking, but not anymore. If a search engine discovers this they will penalize you for it.

Try to avoid “free for all” link pages. You shouldn’t worry about placing your links to your website on pages where everyone is invited to place their own links. This makes it very competitive and you may not get any hits at all to your website. These types of websites already have a very low ranking and will ultimately cost your points with search engine ranking in turn lowering your ranking.

Do not put the words “Under Construction” on your website. That makes you look like an amateur and will make you appear very unprofessional to those viewing your page. If your website looks like you aren’t a professional, that may take away from what you are selling and you may not make any money if you are selling goods or services. And no website owner wants that to happen.

Try not to get carried away with outrageous colors and font changes. If you have a two or three colors or fonts that will usually be good. Don’t have outrageous bright colors that make your eyes squint. That will make others not want to view your website and may affect your ranking in the long run. Always try to go with neutral colors that are easy on the eyes. The same goes with text colors.

Broken links are another factor that can lower your rank on a search engine. If your text is too small or invisible, that makes it not very appealing to the viewer and is frowned upon with the search engines.

If you are over submitting your website to the search engine, you may end up being banned from that particular search engine. There is a long list of do’s and don’ts that will either give your website a very low or very high search engine ranking. Try to avoid all of them and you will soon find yourself ranking very high in the search engine pool and your website will be welcomed.