Pretty much every business owner I know that has a website or is thinking about getting a website wants their website to rank number one in the major search engines. Many never achieve improved search engine ranking because of some of the following mistakes:

Better Search Engine Ranking is Possible!

Many website owners who do try to improve their search engine rankings eventually give up in frustration. Like anything in life though, persistence can pay big dividends. For improved search engine ranking, one of the first things to understand and change is your thinking and approach.

“If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten.”

You need to start by understanding that if you have not improved your search engine ranking, it is most likely because you don't have the knowledge or the thinking to achieve a top ranking. You are most likely committing costly mistakes with your website that you are not even aware of.

Avoid using frames on your website.

Most search engines don't follow frames very well. I have often seen a website that fails to rank well on anything including their own unique business name because they use frames. Do everything you can to rid yourself of frames. Besides the search engine issues, most users end up finding frames more confusing than helpful.

Wasting the potential of the <TITLE> tag

I don't know how many websites I visit that either have only the company name as the title of the page or worse, they have 'untitled'! Your title will show up as the link text that people click on in the search engine results. You need to choose a keyword rich title that also induces people to click on the link and visit your website over the others in the listings. For more about titles, read my article in this series entitled “Better Search Engine Ranking: Your Website Title Could Be Costing You Money”

No Main Headline for the Web Page.

This mistake has equal benefit for search engines and your visitors. Keep in mind that search engines are ultimately in the business of helping people find the information they are looking for. If your site is not giving people a clear indication of the content of the page, they will most likely click away.

In the same way, most search engines look for relevant keywords at the top of the page. The sooner they appear on the page, the higher their prominence. Your headline should feature your major keywords at the beginning with descriptive text following it. I often find myself putting the same headline in both the Title tags and as the main headline of my page. Search engines and people like that a lot.

Repeating your main keyword too often in your text.

This speaks to keyword density. In the very early days of the web, it was possible to achieve a top ranking by simply repeating your main keyword as many times as you could on a page. Do that today, and you'll be lucky to even find your website at all. You may even get banned for life from the search engines for a stunt like that. Less obvious and equally devastating to high rankings is to have too high a keyword density for your page. Both Google and Yahoo look to have a keyword density around 4%. Google likes a keyword density that is lower than Yahoo's.

Better search engine ranking is possible with work.