SEO - Top 10 common mistakes to avoid when you are planning to build a website
1. Domain Name
If you are looking to register a domain name for your website, it is a good idea to choose a domain name for your business containing both your business name and a keyword phrase. For example the following domain name www.smithprintersupplies.co.uk will help your website to achieve higher search engine rankings if someone searches for the phrase ‘printer supplies'.
With any domain name, age plays a very important factor in search engine rankings. The age of a domain gives the appearance of longevity and therefore will give you a higher relevancy score in Google. You will not achieve top positions straight away, as you will need to allow your domain name to grow with age, make sure your pages have been optimised and set up one-way links from related and trusted sites with a good PR score.
2. 302 Re-direct
When you sign up with an internet service provider (ISP) - they will offer you free web space for you to create your own personalised page or website. The problem with this, your domain name and web hosting may be stored in two different locations. You can set up frame forwarding on your domain name, however the search engines will see this as a temporarily 302 re-direct and this will cause problems for the search engines. We would advise registering both your domain name and hosting from the same company to keep things as simple as possible. If not, you will need to ask them to setup a 301 re-direct which is much more friendly and will cause no problems for the search engines.
3. Frames
HTML frames are occasionally used by the web designer to organise the design of a website by loading the pages into a frameset. Search engines or software on the web have trouble in reading frames. The main problem is that many search engine spiders do not follow the frames sources from the frameset page. Those that do follow will end up at a page that is not located within the frameset. If your site uses frames to display your pages - I would recommend using the <noframes> tag to display meaningful content with a list of links. This will help the search engine spiders to visit the rest of your pages more easily.
As for accessibility, frames present a real challenge to users with disabilities and particular those who use screen readers to read your content online. I would strongly advise building a website using frames.
4. Splash Page
A splash page is often used as an introduction to show visitors a graphic or fancy flash animation before they enter the main part of your website. Even though it may look pretty to the visitor, you will have problems in getting good search engine rankings. The is because your page contains none or very little text (containing relevant key phrases) for the search engines to rank your site for.
5. Homepage - Content
The homepage is the most important page of your website as this is generally the first page a visitor sees when clicking on your URL address. You will need to tell your visitors about your services, unique selling points and why they should choose you over your competitors.
We recommend you place between 200-300 words of text on your homepage containing a good keyword weight and prominence of key phrases at the top, middle and bottom of the page. I would also recommend adding an alt tag to each image being displayed across your site's page.
6. Meta Tags
The meta tags are displayed within the <head> section on your page and are intended for use solely by the search engines. The page title is visible at the top of your browser above the title bar displaying your URL address. It is very important to have a unique title, description and keyword tag to reflect the content being displayed on each of your pages.
The keywords tag is now redundant and is not used by the search engines. However, personally, I still like to use this tag to fill in the keywords I have optimised the page for. Each unique page title and description tag must contain relevant key phrases relating to the content being displayed on the page.
7. Heading Tags
I consider this to be one of the most important tag after the page title and description tag on the page. It is amazing how many websites do not display a heading tag to reflect the content being displayed on the page. For example a <h1> heading tag for the company selling printer supplies would look something like this below.
<h1>Great discount on all leading printer supplies </h1>
As you can see the main keyphrase ‘printer supplies' is contained within the <h1> heading tag giving this phrase more weight on the page. There are a list of other important heading tags you can use on the page <h1> to <h6> with the first one being the most important and the last one being the least important.
8. Sitemaps
To make it easier for your visitors and search engines spiders to navigate around the site. We recommend that you add a sitemap to your page containing a list of page links to the rest of your inner pages.
Also, you can visit the following link http://www.xml-sitemaps.com to generate an XML sitemap. Once this has been generated, you must upload this file to the root directory. This will help the search engine spiders to index the rest of your pages more easily.
9. Robots file
It is common practice for web owners to upload a robots.txt file to the root directory on the server. This will give you complete control over which directories you would like or not like the search engine spiders to visit.
10. Content Management Systems (CMS)
A content management system is an interface that allows you to update the content on your pages more easily without relying on your webmaster or web company to do this for you. This can save you time and money, some companies will charge you for any additional changes you would like to make to your website.
One common mistake, I have come across using content management systems is the restriction not being able to have unique meta tags across your site's pages. If your CMS restricts you to do this, your pages will be affected in getting high search engine rankings.
We would advise asking the web company who supplied you with the CMS system, if it is possible to have unique page titles, meta descriptions and keyword tags on your site to help your site with SEO.
| Article Source: | www.compass-seo.co.uk |
| Date Published: | 10 November 2008 |
| Author: | Paul Flaherty |
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