Common Mistakes Made by New Webmasters in Website Optimization
When I initially optimized the website for Jiangsu Zhongjie High-altitude Construction, Installation, and Anti-corrosion Engineering Co., Ltd. (www.jsgkgsw.com), I gained some personal insights. Progress in any endeavor comes from continuous learning and exploration, during which mistakes are naturally unavoidable. This is true for new webmasters optimizing their websites as well. Below, a webmaster shares some of the most common mistakes made by new webmasters in website optimization, hoping that others can learn from them.
(1) Poor Title and Description Writing
Title, Description, and Keywords are the foundation of website optimization, and their importance has been extensively discussed in various articles. To be honest, Zhongjie Company's Chimney Maintenance Department has suffered the most in this area. Looking back, over the past two years, we've revised our titles and descriptions at least five times. Initially, we had no knowledge of keyword popularity, Baidu Index, or search engine optimization, so we focused only on the local market and named it Fujian Secretarial Network. After a while, seeing almost zero traffic, we changed it to Free Secretarial Network, stuffing it with a bunch of related keywords. Later, after reading some articles on webmaster forums, we tried writing soft articles, promoting through forums and blogs, and acquiring a few friendship links. However, feeling that our rankings weren't improving, we again changed it to focus on China's Party and Government Secretarial Network, keeping the title within 30 characters. Although our rankings improved, the traffic was still pitifully low, with only about 150 visitors from Baidu. Being ranked around third place, how many IPs could we get? In this frequent and aimless tweaking, Baidu's trust in our website continuously decreased, repeatedly stopping updates and even reverting to previous versions. The total number of indexed pages dropped from around 10,000 to just over 2,000. After a period of Baidu not indexing our site early this year, I decided to focus on our own brand, renaming it Caiye Siwen Network, choosing some report templates, meeting summaries, work plans, and writing tutorials as long-tail keywords to maintain traffic. However, there were still many issues with the title design.
(2) Disorganized Content Updates
Regular and quantified content updates can win the favor of search engines, especially Baidu (since customers prioritize it), which has been widely recognized in the webmaster community. I have deep feelings about this. Due to poor returns, I'm still fighting alone. Despite my best efforts, even during the Spring Festival and weekends, I have to wake up to ensure updates are completed before 9 AM. However, throughout the year, there are inevitably times when I'm out or busy with other things. Without a team to operate, regular updates are difficult to guarantee. Simultaneously, quantified updates also show friendliness towards Baidu, but like many friends, I haven't paid enough attention to this. During busy times, I post three to five articles; during idle times, I post over a hundred, unintentionally falling into the suspicion of scraping content. Regarding originality, unless you're running a personal blog, or sites where users post information autonomously such as forums, or like Webmaster Forums that gather many writers, for grassroots webmasters, it's quite challenging. All we can do is try our best to create pseudo-original content without relying on software for simple scraping.
(3) Imbalanced Webmaster Mindset
Recently, Aizhan has become very popular, allowing us to roughly estimate competitors' website traffic, and key optimization keywords are no longer secrets. Many webmasters, including myself, become restless after checking competitors' websites. For instance, upon seeing that high-altitude websites ranked ahead receive over 30,000 IPs daily, while I'm still struggling below 1,000, I can't help but sigh, leading to a sharp decrease in execution power. Of course, looking at it from another angle, we should actually feel more confident about the future development of our website. Having excellent competitors to learn from means we can avoid many detours in keyword selection, internal optimization, and external link building, which should make us feel fortunate.
In summary, new websites should carefully design their titles and descriptions before taking action; establish a team of at least two people to maintain regular and quantified updates, focusing on original or pseudo-original content; rationally handle changes in rankings and inclusion, and competition from peers, maintaining a good mindset and execution ability. Hopefully, everyone will succeed.
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