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Last times we talked about 5 SEO myths, this time I want to show you some web design deadly sins that most web site owners make and bury the site in the eyes of search engine such as Google.

But before we begin, couple of announcements,

1. please take a second to finish the poll here, it’s about “what topics of internet marketing you like most reading”. Thanks!
   [polldaddy poll="965560"]
2. I am inviting Alvin Phang, a blogger who is earning 6 figures to come along this weekend and talk about how he start blogging and briefly discuss some of the methods that he used to achieve that goal. I will be putting on the call later next week. After finishing some editing so stay tune!

OK, Let’s go back to our discussion: the 10 deadly web design sins that will bury your site in search engine.

Lack of Keywords in Their Web Page Title

I see some web sites, they only contain their domain names or even left it blank on the web site titles! I see so many webmasters are doing this! Well, including your domain name is NOT a bad idea (for the purpose of branding) but unless your company is a well known one, you should include at least your primary keyword on the web page title tag.

For example, if you are targeting a weight loss industry and your keywords are “weight loss programs”, your home page title may be something as below:

<title>Weight Loss Programs LA – Lose 10 lbs in A Week Guaranteed! <title>

A couple of notes I want to point out are,
1.) the keyword should be placed at the beginning of the title tag to increase search engine relevancy.
2.) For optimizing website targeting Google, the number of characters should be no longer than 64.
3.) Avoid using words like “and”, “in”, “at” in the title, since they are considering as a “stop” word which affects your site search ranking.

Don’t bother to write META description or META Keywords Tag!

Search engine don’t use them to rank any more! You may have heard some one said. Well, yes the affect of the META nowadays are minimized when comparing to 10 years ago where everyone used META keyword tag to gain search engine ranking, but today including them especially the META description tag still have some effects when talking site search positioning, and you should definitely including them. While META keywords, there are still some search engines such as MSN and Yahoo may use it to classify your website, so webmasters are encouraged to include those as well.

A Whole Flashy “beautiful” Web Page

Wow it is so beautiful! How did you do that! If you are a designer you may be very proud of friend’s praise. But hold on my friend, do you know that search engines are “blind” toward flash movies! (just a side note, Few months ago, Google announced they can actually index certain text in flash movie, more details here:) 99% of them could not read what’s inside your flash movie! If search engines don’t understand what your web page, do you think they will index and your page? Certainly not! But what if you really want to do that? One way to get around this problem is to add some text description of that flash movies on your web page. But you have to be very careful on not over doing it such as showing the search engines the text version and your site visitor the flash version. This is a deceptive technique that may result your site to be banned in search engines. (details: Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Technique – Cloaking )

A Graphical Rich Website

As oppose to flash movies, your site may be pictures, images rich. There is nothing wrong with it but make sure you add the descriptive “ALT” tag which contains keywords in all of your images.

A Framed Website

Dear webmaster, your site is well structured and it looks great but it will be buried in 100 levels deep in Google and never be found by any search engine users!

Although framed base websites are gradually phased out, it’s still worth the point on discussing here.

Most Search engines are still having problem indexing a frame based site. If you take a look of this website (e.g.This one) and compare it with that the version which is stored in Search engines, (http://209.85.175.104/search?q=cache:O93GecY4abIJ:searchenginewatch.com/_static/example1.html+site:http://searchenginewatch.com/_static/example1.html&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=hk)
you will find, the stored version basically is “nothing” or completely blank! Well, if search engines can’t index your site no doubt you web page is never be found! One way to work around the problem is by adding a <noframes> tag in your main frameset of the page, add the contents between the <noframes> tags plus add all the links that interconnect with rest of the web pages in your frameset.

That’s about 5 which we have discussed, later this week, I will discuss more of the “web design deadly sins that will bury your site in search engines” so stay tune!

References:

http://www.seobook.com/
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167901

Tags: search engine optimization, search engine ranking, seo, web design

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under seo. 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.