Search Engine Optimisation Pitfalls
On page factors – Is your website search engine friendly?
So you have got a website however where is it on Google? Have you fallen foul of a penalty or have you overlooked one in every of the various common search engine optimisation pitfalls when designing your website?
Understanding what works for the search engines and what doesn’t when it comes to the content on your website will have an important impact on the relevance and/or page rank of your pages from a SEO perspective.
Here we tend to highlight common mistakes that would have an effect on your ranking on Google and alternative search engines.
Optimising for the correct keywords – Basically ‘Get real’ about what keywords you are feeling your web site can be ranked for. If you have a 10 page web site during a highly competitive market then ranking naturally for the most important terms will be shut to impossible. Use the Overture keyword tool along with the quantity of results on Google to seek out out what keywords are searched for and how several alternative websites are targeting them. If you’re lucky then you would possibly even realize a common keyword that not several different websites are optimised for. Alternatively a good tool for this job is Wordtracker from Rivergold Associates Ltd.
Code validation – If your html code is not valid then this could build it terribly troublesome or even not possible for a research engine to separate your page content from your code. If the search engine cannot see your content then your page will clearly have no relevance.
Frames – Although most, if not all, major search engines currently index frames and even with the employment of the NOFRAMES tag you run the risk of your pages being displayed in the search engine results out of context. As each individual page is indexed separately, it is probably that your website visitors can not see your pages among your frame and will effectively be stuck on the page they arrive at.
If you want to use frames then create a ‘Home’ link on every of your individual content pages and point the link at your frameset index page.
JavaScript navigation – If you employ JavaScript to control your website navigation then search engine spiders may have problems crawling your site. If you want to use JavaScript then there are two choices on the market to you:
Use the NOSCRIPT tag to replicate the JavaScript link in standard HTML. Replicate your JavaScript links as normal HTML links within the footer of your page.
Flash content – Currently solely Google can index Macromedia Flash files, how a lot of or how very little content they see is open to debate. So till search engine technology is able to handle your .swf as commonplace then it might be advisable to avoid the employment of these. Once more if you want to use Flash then provide a standard HTML alternative inside NOEMBED tags.
Dynamic URLs – Though Google and Yahoo are able to crawl sophisticated URLs it’s still advisable to keep your URLs straightforward and avoid the utilization of long query strings. Don’t together with session IDs within the URL as these can either produce a ‘spider lure’ where the spider indexes the page again and again once more or, at worst, your pages can not get indexed at all. If you are doing would like to incorporate parameters within the URL then limit them to 2 and the number of characters per parameter to ten or less.
The simplest SEO resolution for dynamic URLs is to use Mod-rewrite or Multiviews on Apache.
No sitemap – A sitemap is the search engine optimisation tool of choice to ensure every page within your website is indexed by all search engines. You ought to link to your web site map from, at least, your homepage but preferably from each page on your website. If your web site contains lots of pages then split the sitemap into several categorised maps and link these all together. Strive and keep the amount of links per page on a sitemap to less than 100.
Excessive links – Excessive links on a given page (Google recommends having no more than a hundred) will lower its relevance and, although it does not lead to a ban, this does nothing for your search engine optimisation strategy.
Use caution who you link to – As you have got no control over who links to your website, incoming links will not harm your rank. But outbound links from your web site to ‘unhealthy neighbourhoods’ like link farms will hurt your ranking.
More often than not guarantee as many of your outbound links as attainable link to websites that are topical to your field of business.
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