Your website position in the search engines will fluctuate and needs regular monitoring to make sure what you are doing is appropriate. Below are some of the most common search engine optimization mistakes.

Website Title

If any part of a website was of the highest priority it would be the title of each individual page. The title needs to be relevant, proper length and unique to every page. Many web designers don’t understand search engine optimization, or claim they do, but they don’t optimize even the simplest of areas on the web pages.

Website Description

The description tag is important because it’s what Google can use to give a brief synopsis of your web page. It’s not guaranteed that Google will use it, but it’s a highly percentage rate that they do.

Website SEO Keywords

There are hundreds of articles that say search engines, including Google, do not use the keywords meta tag. I will disagree with them 100% because I have tested the theory. Even if it was a “fluke” it doesn’t hurt to use the tag and I have seen results that contradict the articles saying it’s not valued.

No Relevant Keywords on a Page

If you page doesn’t mention your product or service you aren’t going to have good ranking within any search engine. With this being said it doesn’t imply that you should stuff the keyword all over the page to make it work, that will actually have a negative impact on your page. You need to be sure that you have mention of the page specific keywords on the page but that the page still makes sense to read.

Number of Back Links

Do you know how many other websites link to your website? Search engines do. The more links to your website from trusted website, the better. The quality and source of the links are highly important to search engines. You can have thousands of links from other websites to yours but if they are from sites search engines classify as controversial you will have a negative impact. If you suddenly gain hundreds of links overnight, this can also trip the alerts at the search engines and you can end up worse than before.

Landing pages are a very important puzzle piece with search engine optimization and are essential in funneling and engaging your customer. However, you can’t optimize landing pages for the search engines…you have to optimize them for your readers because the search engines aren’t going to be the ones to use your service or buy your product. While you do need to be found, once you’re found you have to be able to convert that into a revenue of some sort.

How to Build the Landing Page:

These are numerous guides and books available on the web about building landing pages. One of the more important common themes among all these available guides is that you need a “call to action” above the fold. Most SEO companies will say that they want text at the top of the page and all the other stuff can go below it because search engines like it that way. Once again, your customers and end users should be your target when building landing pages…not the search engines.

Before you create landing pages you need to have a purpose. Your website certainly has a reason whether it’s to sell a product, educate people, provide funding, deliver a service or whatever it is…it has a purpose. Now you have to determine with that purpose how do you want to attract people and convert them into customers.

Once you determine that you move on to grabbing the attention of the users and keep their attention while you push them towards your goal of converting them into a customer. You can do this with an attractive first paragraph with an almost immediate call to action. With this though keep in mind you need to attract not only the visual and mental users. Some users prefer images (visual users) and some prefer text (mental users).

So on your landing pages make sure you don’t mislead a user in any way. You need to provide them the information, product or service they are looking for and if you do that without making it difficult to find they will keep coming back to your website.