Ten Site Promotion Mistakes

1. Keyword overload. It's true that search engines list and rank sites based, in part, upon the frequency of certain words on each site. For a long time, this was taken advantage of by overloading certain pages with repetitive or unrelated keywords, but search engines have caught on and will punish sites that try to do this.

2. Deception. It's both ineffective and detrimental to try to attract people who are expecting to see something different. If you try to get a baseball-related site listed among search results for child care products by naming one of your pages "Child Care Products," one or more of the following will happen: 1) you'll end up with angry visitors, 2) nothing will happen because your site is irrelevant in that category, or 3) search engines will lower your ranking or drop your site entirely.

3. Stale content. If you don't regularly update your site, people will lose interest, and in some cases search engines will deem your site outdated because it hasn't changed for a long time.

4. Poor site availability. Search engines will notice if your site is down frequently. Don't throw away your search engine placement by going with an unreliable hosting company.

5. Spam. Want to annoy your customers and possibly get in trouble with the law at the same time? Unsolicited e-mail will do the trick, although it's not just limited to e-mail. If you abuse discussion forums or search engines (by repeatedly submitting your site), you're doing yourself a disservice.

6. An unfinished site. Don't waste your time and money on an incomplete web site. Your return on investment will be lower, you'll turn off potential customers, and you might hurt your placement on search engines.

7. Automated search engine submission. Some software packages and promotion companies offer automated submission to search engines, where you simply enter some information about your web site and your company, and this information is then submitted in bulk, sometimes to hundreds of search engines and directories. There are two problems with this. First of all, only the top eight to 12 search engines are really worth submitting your site to, so you're wasting your money registering elsewhere (with the exception of certain local or specialized directories). Second, and most importantly, search engines and web directories generally don't look kindly upon automated submissions, and will often ignore them or even drop your site from its listings.

8. Link overload. There are numerous promotion techniques that have been exploited in the past and are now policed by search engines, and "link overload" is one of them. Major search engines take into account the number and relevance of other sites linking to yours, so if you set up link exchanges with inappropriate sites, or if there are pages on other web sites with multiple links to yours, you run the risk of hurting your search engine rankings.

9. Superlatives. When submitting your site to Yahoo!, Open Directory, or another major web directory, one way to virtually ensure that you won't get listed is to describe your site, your company or your services as "the best," "the most," "#1," or any other kind of superlative. Focus more on including important keywords in your description, and less on writing ad copy.

10. Competitor abuse. This is a tricky subject because there's a fine line between competition and infringement. Although it can be beneficial to mimic your competitors' web sites and promotion tactics, it's probably not a great idea to set up a web address that includes a competitor name, or to mention a competitor's name frequently in the code of your site. A well promoted web site shouldn't require these practices anyway.