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7 Website Problems that Hurt SEO Rankings

Doug Williams @ 3:56 am

This blog entry was posted on October 18, 2008.

To get the best search engine optimization results, a business website should be designed for SEO. But what happens if you already have a good website that converts interested visitors into paying customers? What are common website problems that will keep your website from being ranked on page 1 of the Google Results? What can you do about it?

  1. All Flash websites: These are websites built entirely in Flash. They are cool looking and visually vibrant. Search engines have limited ability to index Flash content. The best solution is to provide additional HTML pages that search engines and visitors can look at.
  2. Splash Pages: This is a graphic entry page where often the only text present is the word “Enter.” Search engines give more value to the home page than any other page on the website. Splash pages are a complete waste of the most valuable real estate on the entire website and should be removed if search rankings are important.
  3. Frames: This is an extension to HTML that allows several web pages to appear in a single web browser window. These pages are held together with a “Frameset” command. Frames create severe problems with search engines being able to “crawl” your website. Frames websites should be recoded into HTML or better yet, into XHTML / CSS formats.
  4. Online carts: Online stores come in many forms and many have excellent functionality and “instant” ability to easily have an online store. Many do not allow FTP access so there may be very limited SEO Potential. To these carts add as much keyword rich content as possible and launch an aggressive link popularity campaign.
  5. Website builders: These are websites designed and maintained with a CMS. They have no FTP access and are marketed under names like: Websites Tonight, Websmartz and EZ Generator. This includes many special purpose websites such as Real Estate, mortgage and insurance agent websites. These usually have no FTP access and you will be limited to adding keyword rich text and an aggressive link popularity campaign such as blog marketing.
  6. Dynamic URLs: These are the database queries that have a “?” in them. Replace long query strings and session ID’s with static URLs. This will greatly improve the crawlability of a large dynamic database type website.
  7. Invalid Code: Check your website at http://validator.w3.org and if the number of code errors exceeds 25 per page, go in and fix the errors. This website validator will tell you the nature and the location of the problem. You do not need 100% valid code to get #1 rankings, but large numbers of code errors does hurt rankings.

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Related posts:

  1. SEO Blogging: Improve Search Engine Rankings Fast
  2. Is your E-Commerce Website SEO friendly?

Filed under: SEO Strategies,Website Design

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 3:56 am and is filed under SEO Strategies, Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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