Ever since businesses started using the internet, Search Engine Optimisation (S.E.O.) has been constantly evolving to maximise the benefits from online marketing. SEO is a branch of online marketing, focusing on improving how a site is seen in search engines and helping to boost the number of visitors that a web site receives from a search engine. Of course, there are a number of common mistakes made when trying to optimise a site for search engines:

Using images where plain text is more appropriate

This is both an accessibility and SEO mistake for obvious reasons. Search engines cannot read text displayed in images, so using images or backgrounds composed mostly of text, instead of plain text, just for aesthetic purposes can be seen as a mistake. This does not always pose a problem where the text in the image is non-essential, but many designers continue to design a site in a graphical program such as Photoshop, then just splice (cut up and stick back together) in a web browser. The effect is usually not noticeable to an end user, until they try to highlight some of the text on the page and realise it’s an image. For disabled users, e.g. a blind or partially sighted user, the page may be completely unusable as their text-to-speech software will not be able to read out the text in the images, unless alternative text is specified. 

Similarly, search engines will just ignore the image altogether if alternative text is not specified within the image tag, meaning a lot of important content may be ignored completely. If your competitors are using plain text which is crawlable by search engines, you’re already at a disadvantage - users searching for keywords will be more likely to find your competitor’s site before yours, since those keywords are on your competitor’s pages and not yours.

Using text within should not be entirely discouraged - for non-essential text, which is only there for aesthetic reasons, images can be used and may help improve the appearance of a page to the end user. Just be sure to add alternative text, using the “alt” attribute of the <img> tag. Of course, logos qualify as a completely legitimate use of images that include text.

Not having a sitemap on a large site

Small sites that only have a couple of pages are usually relatively easy to navigate and search engines will almost definitely find the other pages of the site, so long as there are links to them. However, a larger site (perhaps with more than 10 or 15 pages of content) should have a sitemap to tell search engines the location of all of the pages, to ensure none are missed out. The sitemap can come in 2 forms:

1) A simple web page somewhere on the site with links to all of the pages. This approach not only allows search engines to find every page, but also aids visitors that are lost or searching for a particular page on the site.

2) An XML sitemap, submitted to a search engine manually. This approach allows you to give more information about each page to the particular search engine. You can specify the importance of a page; your desired crawl frequency; last time the page was modified and of course the location of the page on your site. You can manually create one of these, or use a free service like XML sitemaps, which will create a sitemap by crawling your site and then allow you to download the file. Afterwards, you can upload this file to your site and tell Google where to find it using Google’s webmaster tools.

Using Flash for the entire site, or using Flash or Javascript for the navigation

This SEO nightmare is very common. There are millions of websites out there where either Flash has been either used for the entire site, or Flash/Javascript has been used for the navigation bar, with no other links between pages.

Search engines cannot read Flash animation, and therefore a website designed solely in Flash is simply seen as a blank page in a search engine! All content written in Flash is invisible to search engines, so even if the site looks incredible to a visitor, search engines won’t be able to see anything, and therefore the site may well not rank very well at all in the results.

Using Flash or Javascript in the navigation bar is another common mistake. While the result may be pretty to an end user, if no other methods are used to link between pages (i.e. a sitemap), then search engines may not be able to crawl the rest of the site and miss out on a lot of content. CSS is a good alternative these days to Javascript or Flash menus, as it means you can code the HTML links into the navigation bar and then separately style them for visitors.

Leaving the <title> tag blank, not having a site description, or having duplicate site descriptions

It may sound very basic, but it happens a lot. People leave important areas such as the <title> tag blank on their site, and are therefore at a disadvantage compared to those who have a relevant title tag. A site description no longer plays a huge part in whether your site ranks very well in a major search engine, but it is still useful to visitors and summing up what the page is actually about. Remember: don’t spam. As mentioned, descriptions have already become less important in defining the ranking of a page, so a useless description full of keywords won’t help a potential visitor either and is as good as worthless. Duplicate site descriptions are also something to be aware of - try, wherever possible, to have a separate meta description on each page.

Having a bad domain name or page URL

Again, this issue is both a usability and search engine optimisation issue.

Your domain name should be fairly short so that visitors can remember it. Furthermore, it should also be relevant to what your business provides, and ideally contain your company name as well. A perfect example of this occurred when I was redesigning the Sitting Pretty toilets web site - the old domain name was PortableToiletAndShowerHireMidWales.co.uk! (what a mouth full). This is obviously not meeting the trade off between a memorable domain name and having a keyword or two in your URL. The new domain name I purchased was SittingPrettyToilets.co.uk - much shorter and concise, yet still containing a relevant keyword. Don’t take this the wrong way - you should buy a domain name primarily because it is brandable and memorable - however, containing a relevant keyword without making the domain name too long is beneficial.

The URL should, wherever possible, describe what the page is about - e.g. www.yoursite.com/our-web-design-services is better than www.yoursite.com/page.php?id=391. Not only does it immediately tell a visitor what page they are on, but search engines will also prefer the first URL to the second. The first URL contains “web design services”, whilst the second URL contains only numbers and is absolutely useless as far as SEO goes. Also, some people have suggested Google tends to crawl URLs that appear as static more than dynamic ones - i.e. URLs that do not obviously contain variables are better than ones that do. For instance,
www.yoursite.com/id/50/ourwebdesignservices/page/1/ is preferable to www.yoursite.com/page.php?id=50&name=ourwebdesignservices&page=1. For information on how to achieve a rewritten (clean) URL without variables using mod_rewrite, try reading this article.

Believing you can ignore everything else, as long as you have plenty of incoming links

Links, links, links. That used to be the most important factor in SEO, and it still does play an important part in getting traffic and credibility to search engines. However, links alone won’t bring in quality traffic, or make your site rank well in search engines. To a search engine, a link from another site to yours is seen as a recommendation - the other site recommends your site to their visitors. It gives your site credibility and popularity.

However, links have been abused - become of the SEO benefits, people have been swapping hundreds of links with each other, in order to boost their rankings. The result is Google and other search engines changing their algorithms so that their results are not so easily manipulated. Links alone won’t bring you sales or even good rankings anymore. You need to follow good SEO practices and overall build a site that is useful and usable to a visitor, whilst not neglecting search engines.

Conclusion

There are of course a hundreds of SEO mistakes, some more damaging than others, and I wouldn’t suggest that this list is exhaustive. Still, if you avoid all of these, you’re at least part of the way towards optimising your site for search engines. The key to remember when designing a site is that the visitor should come first, but always bear in mind that search engines bring in traffic, so try to use SEO-friendly techniques wherever possible.

On August 28th, 2008 by Dan Price. Filed under SEO.
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