The sad truth is there’s no ‘quick fix’ to growing your site’s popularity but there some ways you can quickly destroy your site’s reputation and placing in search engines.
One of the biggest mistakes any eager site owner can make is to get involved in link exchange schemes.
Of course it’s fine (and highly desirable) to link to other people’s sites and ask them to link to yours. These ‘honest’ links are how the web works and as your site grows in popularity it’ll attract more and more links.
But at some stage most site owners find themselves being asked to swap links with some random site so both can ‘benefit’ from increased visitors . The best thing to do is delete the emails and move on.
Most of the paid-for link schemes will see you and other site owners back linking to low-ranking sites, sometimes hosting malicious content, and normally of no relevance to your users.
Such links can lead to your site being demoted or even dropped from search engines.
If you have a blog which allows comments and trackbacks, be careful before approving comments with URLs – these too can be an attempt to use your site to create back links to iffy sites.
The other common mistake is to fall for promises by ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ agencies who “guarantee” a front page listing on major search engines.
Despite the claims, no-one can guarantee where your site will appear in a search engine – each has its own rules about what will appear and where and the tactics used by some SEO firms can have your site dropped by the engines.
It’s not hard to get an initial high ranking for any site – filling it with ‘keywords’ and generating a high number of backlinks (see above) can see your site riding high for a few days but very son it will fall back down.
If you want search engines to like your site you should write naturally, ensuring content works best for your visitors, and not overuse keywords.
We’ll be looking at safe ways to promote your site in a future article.
