SEO forms an integral part of online marketing strategy to increase leads and sales. Each website competes with each other to get a higher page rank, therefore to optimize the exposure in the first pages of the search engine. I’ve made a brief rundown of common problems found in SEO and a gentle reminder of things to avoid so you don’t demote your page rank.
frames – Frames were popular at the beginning of the Internet age. However, frames are not search engine friendly as they always confuse the search engine to find the correct resources on the website. The main problem is that when the visitor finds your website, the search engine will take them to a single frame page with no navigation, instead of the main index page.
Ajax and SEO – You can easily create an attractive interactive site with Ajax. Unfortunately, Ajax and SEO don’t go together. It is well known that a website built with AJAX would not be crawled or indexed by search engines. This is understandable because most search engines don’t read java script.
duplicate content – Contents copied from other websites should always be avoided as Google will tend to lower the ranking of the website or the website will be blacklisted.
Password protected page – Web pages that require login will not be crawled or indexed as the crawler does not have access to the page.
Robots.txt – This could be human error when a developer uploads the robots.txt script from the test server to the production server without removing “Disallow: /”. With this declared command, you tell crawlers not to index any of your pages.
Photos – website only: some websites are designed with only images containing attractive design and special fonts. It can look great, unfortunately the search engine cannot read images and can only read the alt text on the image. You just can’t insert all the content inside the alt text.
broken links – The search engine simply cannot follow the broken links to the next destination. It is obvious that the broken link will devalue your ranking in the index. Therefore, validate the links on your website frequently using Xenu’s Link Sleuth. It is free software that you can take advantage of.
There is no doubt that the presentation of a website is important, but if the website cannot be included in the search engine, then it will never be able to get a high position in the ranking pages!
