Search Engine Optimisation Pitfalls
On page factors – Is your web site search engine friendly?
So you’ve got a website however where is it on Google? Have you fallen foul of a penalty or have you overlooked one among the numerous common search engine optimisation pitfalls when coming up with your site?
Understanding what works for the search engines and what doesn’t when it involves the content on your website can have a crucial impact on the relevance and/or page rank of your pages from a SEO perspective.
Here we tend to highlight common mistakes that could affect your ranking on Google and other search engines.
Optimising for the correct keywords – Essentially ‘Get real’ regarding what keywords you feel your website can be ranked for. If you have a ten page web site in an exceedingly 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 sought for and the way several different websites are targeting them. If you are lucky then you would possibly even find a fashionable keyword that not several alternative websites are optimised for. Alternatively a good tool for this job is Wordtracker from Rivergold Associates Ltd.
Code validation – If your html code isn’t valid then this could make it terribly tough or even not possible for a quest 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 – While most, if not all, major search engines currently index frames and even with the utilization of the NOFRAMES tag you run the danger of your pages being displayed within the search engine results out of context. As every individual page is indexed separately, it is probably that your web site visitors can not see your pages among your frame and can effectively be stuck on the page they arrive at.
If you need to use frames then produce a ‘Home’ link on every of your individual content pages and point the link at your frameset index page.
JavaScript navigation – If you use JavaScript to control your web site navigation then search engine spiders might have issues crawling your site. If you need to use JavaScript then there are two choices obtainable to you:
Use the NOSCRIPT tag to replicate the JavaScript link in customary HTML. Replicate your JavaScript links as standard HTML links within the footer of your page.
Flash content – Currently only Google can index Macromedia Flash files, how abundant or how little content they see is open to debate. So till search engine technology is ready to handle your .swf as standard then it’d be advisable to avoid the utilization of these. Again if you need to use Flash then offer a normal HTML various at intervals NOEMBED tags.
Dynamic URLs – Although Google and Yahoo are able to crawl complicated URLs it is still advisable to stay your URLs straightforward and avoid the employment of long query strings. Don’t as well as session IDs within the URL as these can either create a ‘spider lure’ where the spider indexes the page frequently once more or, at worst, your pages can not get indexed at all. If you are doing want to include parameters within the URL then limit them to 2 and the number of characters per parameter to 10 or less.
The simplest SEO answer for dynamic URLs is to use Mod-rewrite or Multiviews on Apache.
No sitemap – A sitemap is that the search engine optimisation tool of selection to ensure every page within your web site is indexed by all search engines. You must link to your website map from, at least, your homepage however preferably from each page on your website. If your web site contains tons of pages then split the sitemap into several categorised maps and link these all together. Try and keep the quantity of links per page on a sitemap to less than 100.
Excessive links – Excessive links on a given page (Google recommends having not more than a hundred) can lower its relevance and, although it does not lead to a ban, this does nothing for your search engine optimisation strategy.
Take care who you link to – As you have no control over who links to your web site, incoming links can not hurt your rank. But outbound links from your web site to ‘bad neighbourhoods’ like link farms will harm your ranking.
Most of the time ensure as many of your outbound links as doable link to websites that are topical to your field of business.
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