Following are the 9 Biggest SEO Mistakes which Web Designers & Web Developers should avoid.Splash PageIâve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link âClick here to enterâ on their homepage. The worst case â the âenterâ link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.This is fine if you donât care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, youâre making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your websiteâs highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.Non-spiderable Flash MenusMany designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they canât be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.Image and Flash ContentWeb spiders are like a text-based browser, they canât read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.Overuse of AjaxA lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because, ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.Another disadvantage of Ajax â since the address URL doesnât reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.Versioning of Theme DesignFor some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (i.e. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.âClick Hereâ Link Anchor TextYou probably see this a lot where people use âClick hereâ or âLearn moreâ as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for âClick Hereâ. But, if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use, that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. Itâs much more descriptive (and relevant) to say âlearn more about {keyword topic}âWarning: Donât use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.Common Title Tag MistakesSame or similar title text:Every page on your site should have a unique
March 4th, 2010
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