Avoiding SEO Mistakes

The following is a brief list of items web designers, web developers, and web optimisers should try to avoid when performing SEO on a website.

Splash Pages

Splash pages are a thing of the past, and should stay there. It’s a shame however, we still see many sites out there still that have a splash, or landing page, with a banner that asks the visitor to click on a banner to enter the site. Not only is this bad for SEO, it’s also high on the usability no no list. Take this one step further, sometimes, these pages are 100% flash, making it impossible for search engines to spider the page, and follow the link.

Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by search engine crawlers. Your internal pages will not appear in a search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at a very minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

Flash Menus that cant be spidered

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in/out and animated menus. Yep, sometimes they look the business, but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed. Big mistake.

Image and Flash Content

Dont embed important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and images.

Ajax heavy sites

Dont try to impress too much, specifically by deploying massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), as this is a big SEO mistake. Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (i.e. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

“Click Here” Link Anchor Text

You probably see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But, if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use, that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”. Don’t use the exact same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

Common Title Tag Mistakes

Same or similar title text:
Every page on your site should have a unique <title> tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that every page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

Exceeding the character limit:
In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

Keyword stuffing the title:
Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways.

Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results.

Unfriendly URLs

Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

These things are the pillars of Search Engine Optimisation and so to your web site’s success path.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 10:01 am and is filed under SEO & Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.