Dont do what Anthony Dont Does
This list describes some common pitfalls that most sites could vanquish really easily to achieve better SEO. I have personally made some of these mistakes; luckily I found my own solutions which I’ll share with you. This is my growing list of SEO Mistakes;
Written by Anthony Brewittt
Frames in websites
Frames are used as a method of viewing pages that have scrollable areas. The frame is commonly known to use one singular URL but in fact it uses multiple URL’s. There is a major pitfall with any site that still uses frames; aside from being aesthetically confusing and ridiculously outdated the frames themselves are all but ignored by all major search engines.
Frames hinder the spider’s ability to index the content of the page. The preferred method to achieve this affect is to use CSS to make sections scrollable.
You can simply add a height to a division and then declare the divisions overflow property to the value of scroll :
1 2 3 4 | div#ScrollBox { height:200px; Overflow: Scroll; } |
JavaScript Navigation
JavaScript is a client side scripting language used to improve websites functionality, this can include validating forms; creating cookies, browser detection, and can even produce entire web applications. The problem with JavaScript is that Spiders cannot read it; this means that the sections created that are sometimes heavily into JavaScript will not be indexed well or at all.
An advantage of JavaScript is that it can be used to easily preload images for navigation, but for SEO purposes this should be avoided, stick with text / CSS navigation instead of using JavaScript navigation because as well as the spider problem, anchor text links form a valuable part of a sites page indexing.
So a simple JavaScript solution would be to use an external page to store your JavaScript, this can be stored in a .js file on the server and will also result in lighter page weight and increase the pages accessibility:
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://yourdomain.com/jscript.js"></script>Flash Navigation
Flash is a tool for creating animated and interactive content for your site; you can even make a full flash site. For most cases this is where the problem begins, again the navigation on the site is a vital indexing method that all spiders gather, if the navigation is purely flash then the spiders will ignore the links and valuable indexing points have been lost. Use text links instead of flash, if it is vital that flash be used for the navigation then make sure that you have text links as well, so that the links are indexed.
CSS has some pretty flashy rollover affects for you to take advantage of.
Check out the fantastic Listmatic for some great CSS navigation affects.
Hidden Text
Hidden text is a method of integrating text the same color as the background color of a page and inserting masses of keywords and descriptions that the spider will use to give your site a higher ranking.
Using hidden or invisible text was a big hit back in the day, but now our search engines are just too smart for these methods, and more often than not if caught the site is penalized from the search engine.
Avoid hidden text like the plague and use correct markup methods to interact with indexing spiders. Use heading tags properly, for example you should only have one h3 tag per page and maybe three or four h2 tags at the most. Also don’t forget to use tags such as emphasize, bold and strong these tags add valuable weight to support a documents page indexing.
No Title Tags
Title tags are tags within the head section of the (X)HTML document that provide valuable information for the spiders about each individual page. The title tag should be descriptive and contain your main keywords for that page. Use title tags and be very descriptive in your title tags, but make sure the language is readable.
The pages keywords should be in the title tag and I have also noticed that the words that come first seem to hold more weight when it comes to indexing, so make sure your keywords are first in your title tag followed by less specific words.
Not Using META Tags
Whilst it does seem true that the humble meta tags are an outdated method for spiders to index your pages they still exhibit a fundamental scope of your page. The description meta is used as the introduction paragraph to your site on many search engines rankings. So I still use them! not in a lot of detail but I always make sure I use the basics; keywords and descriptions.
Mike’s comments
All the above points are very true. Id like to add which I think is the biggest mistake made by me and everyone else; be patient!
These SEO tips wont work overnight, you need to be patient with the various engines so they can get round to indexing you, and as you grow in size/popularity, expect your site to too. Sometimes it can take 6-7 months to get a good rank on search engines, until then, wait!
And do not just focus on google, engines like yahoo are still vary popular and usually are easier to get ranked on, especially with a new domain (as google prefers, and is bias towards long established domains).
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Anthony says:
Couldnt agree more with that last comment from mike; One more thing to remember is “play it safe”, accessible well formed html pages will rank well in all engines and accessibility and SEO go hand in hand!
Comment made on February 9, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Chuck Hogg says:
All listed are the starters for good organic search engine optimization. However, don’t forget to really optimize your content as well. Many sites don’t place enough emphasis on this, as it will greatly increase your exposure. Bullet your important parts of your page and include hyperlinks and images with alt tags. One other very successful tip is to list in AdWords or Overture. This creates deep links from hundreds if not thousands of other sites for a relatively low cost.
Comment made on February 9, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Harvey says:
I think you mean there should only be one H1 per page (you say one H3).
Image navigation is almost as evil as flash or JS navigation, because most of the time you can achieve the same effect with text links and CSS (which of course means link text passed with the link).
Comment made on July 4, 2007 at 8:17 pm