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Here are 5 very costly mistakes that webmasters make when optimizing their web pages for the search engines. The search engine bots are getting smarter all of the time and bad SEO practices no longer go unnoticed. A poorly or incorrectly optimized website will kill your online business with the search engines.

1. Not selecting the right keyword.

It is very important that you use keywords that are targeted to the content on your web pages. Using keywords that are similar is totally useless and will send the wrong traffic to your website. Your keywords must be exactly the same as your website content.

2. Keywords Spamming (Using the same keywords over and over).

Never use keyword spamming or stacking. The search engines will downgrade and penalize your website for doing this. Instead, use keyword rich content on your web pages.

3. Using a free domain name or web hosting service.

Never use a free domain to host your business website. You want a domain that you can name whatever you want. You can’t do that with a free domain. You will have to use the free hosts domain name. Search engines generally will index free domains as a whole but not individual websites, which will do you no good. Spend a few bucks and get a real hosted domain that you can call your own.

4. Using hidden text to make your web pages more relevant.

Hiding the text within your web pages to make it appear that you have a laser targeted website doesn’t work with the search engines anymore. You will be severely penalized by the search engines for doing this. Even if you remove the hidden text it will take a long time, if ever, to recover from it. Don’t do it. It’s not only bad for your search engine ranking. It’s unethical.

5. Using keywords that have nothing to do with your website.

Putting popular keywords on your web page for the sole reason of attracting people to your website is a huge mistake. Using unrelated keywords can get your website banned from the search engines.

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After writing about Fall of the Gurus Manual last week got me thinking about some things to protect yourself from getting ripped off. If you sell your own products you need to have a robots.txt on your domain to protect your download page from being seen by the general surfing community.

A robots.txt is simply a text file that you place in the document root of your domain. What it does is tells the search engine robots what folders not to crawl and index. This is very important in protecting files and folders such as your cgi-bin that you don’t want seen by the general public.

If you promote and sell your own product, you definitely don’t want your download page listed on the search engines for everyone to see. The robots.txt will prevent that from happening.

The robots.txt in itself will not keep people from accessing your download page, it will just stop the search engines from listing it in their index. You need to take additional steps to protect it.

Most marketers, who sell their own products, use third party payment services. Pretty much all of them will require a landing page of some sort to where the consumer will be taken after payment has been made. This means that when the payment has been made the consumer must be sent to either a download page, a thank you page with a link to the download, or some type of instructional page on your domain.

The reason I mention the payment process is because the majority of websites that are compromised, are through these landing pages. If these web pages are not protected in some form they will inevitably be compromised.

Most of the time people who are looking to get stuff for free and can’t find the page that they are looking for in the search engines index will try to guess the most obvious directory and file names to where the download page may be.

My point is, don’t place your download page in an obvious place or give your download page an obvious name such as download/index.html or download/download.html or anything similar that can be easily guessed. Instead, place it several directories deep and use unique names for each directory that can’t possibly be guessed. You can use names that are total nonsense, which is probably the best way to go. Do the same for the download page as well. After all, you are not trying to rank for this page. You are trying to protect it.

If you have a domain other than the one that you are promoting your product from, you could also put your download page using the above method and redirect buyers to a download page on that domain which would further protect your product.

Another thing that you could do is password protect your download page. I used to sell some of my own products online. What I had was a script that would create a password and place that password on the landing page. When the user clicked away from that web page the password would be deleted. Scripts like this are pretty expensive and are really not required if you take the proper steps to protect your download page. If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t have bought that script. It does however add extra security.

Here are some of the things that you should have on your robots text.

There may be others that you’ll want to protect. Only you have that answer.

You can create a robots.txt by using an online robots.txt creator. Here’s one that you can use http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/robots.txt_creator.shtml There are many others. You can run a search to find additional sites that perform this function. You can also create one yourself manually if you’d like. There are several online tutorials that will show you how.

If you haven’t done some or any of the things mentioned here to protect your products, you really should go and take care of it by implementing the procedures mentioned here to protect them.