Deadly Web Design Sins That Harm Your Site Ranking (2)

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Last time we talked about 5 deadly sins that may bury your site to 10 level deeps of search engines, this time I will talk another 4.

Use of Graphical Menus

Some web master decided to have graphical as their navigation menus. They look attractive , clean and beautiful but as we mentioned in my last post, search engines don’t index graphics! They only index texts! The reasons why images results still appear in search engines queries because they rely on the “ALT” image tag to give them more clues on what this picture or photo is all about. However if you use graphical menus, make sure you add alternative text links somewhere at your site because, it gives the search engine and your vision impaired visitors more information about your inner pages and hence increase the chance of your inner pages to be found in search engines.

Extensive Use of Inline Javascript

Use of javascript is nothing wrong but when you use it too often on a page where you put ALL of the code inside your page rather than use of an external file, it may affect your page load time thus your site search engine ranking. You have to keep in mind search Engines don’t index Javascript. They tend to ignore it. The reason perhaps, most javascript only affect the general presentation of a website on user web browser rather gives search engines more information on what your web page is all about. So when you use javascript, try to use an external .js file and put all of your javascript code inside that file rather than call it inline. To find out how you can do that, there is an article which may be useful: Javascript Friend or Foe? It is also true that don’t just use javascript on your navigation menus. Because search engines don’t execute them and if your web site visitors disable javascript and they don’t know about your inner web pages, and they may just leave and never come back again! Do you want that to happen?

Inline Cascade Styling Sheets, CSS

CSS is a good way to organize and design your webpages but put them on an external file. It is widely believe search engines spiders are busy. They want relevant information about a web page immediately! They don’t want bunches of unrelated javascript, CSS codes floating around at the top of a web page and no information (that is text contents mainly) about your site until they reach the bottom of a page. So keep your CSS layout to a separate file is advisable.

The use of complicated URLs

Technology like php, asp, jsp are nothing wrong when creating web pages and in fact they are so user friendly that webmasters can create a web page by just normal typing as you normally do on word processors but their URLs produced look ugly (such as www.mygoodnessduds.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=32 ) and the symbols in URLs such as “&”, “?”, “=”, “+” etc, are NOT all search engines can index them properly. Hence it is advisable to redirect them using a more descriptive static URLs. For example, this blog is used of wordpress, if you don’t use a permalink redirect plugin, your posts basically looks like that:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=1

Well, that link gives no idea to both users and search engines on what that post is all about. It simply says it probably is the first post on your blog. So if you use a redirect, you can give more ideas to your user and robots about your web page and no need to blind guess. For example: this post the URL is
[quickcode] http://www.prosoncheng.com/seo/deadly-web-design-sins/ [/quickcode]. It certainly gives you some idea on what this post is all about. SEO and web design, right? You may not know it exactly until you read it but it gives you some ideas, right. So when search engine read that page on search engines, they will likely to click because the URL tells something that the user may have interest on. That’s important!

Compare MyGoodnessDude.com and ArtticleSnatch.com, which search engine results gives your more idea about a web page? (click the image to enlarge)

Remember when you are doing SEO on your site, every bit counts. If your competitor do more than you, their websites will rank higher hence receives more free search engine traffic theoretically. So it is up to you if you want to implement or not.

Later in this series, we will talk about another controversial issue, Google Sand box, does it really exist? so stay tune!