1. Landing Page

Many sites want to add a landing page into their site with little or no content on it. Quote often this is in Flash, including the link to your website. This means the search engines will never get past your first page and your website will never get picked up. It is also very hard to get a website index in the search engines with one page of little or not content.

If search engines are not important to you then fine, go for it and make it look fantastic. However if you care about your ranking then you need to think very carefully about doing this and at least you need to have a text link to you main website.

2. Flash Menus

One of the biggest things is creating a really impressive menu with effects that needs to be done in Flash. This is great but the search engines can only read text links so they won't be able to follow any links in your menu. Either avoid or find a way around it. My best fixt is to add some links in your footer, including a sitemap and then include all your pages here.

3. Poor Quality Anchor Text

You will see a lot of sites that will say things like, ‘For more information click here' and the click here part is the link. This is great for getting people around your website but do you want to rank in the search engines for click here. My guess is that you probably do not so you should aim to use your keywords in your anchor text. You could change the above to, ‘For more information visit our KEYWORD page' and the keyword is the anchor text. As a foot note, try to vary the anchor text on your website, using the same term all the time can look like spam.

4. Keeping the Title/Meta Tag the Same

When you put your website together you need to add the title tags and meta descriptions to every page. If you have a large website this might seem boring and you might be tempted to use generic titles and descriptions. If you did it would be a big mistake. One of the things search engines check is that you have different tags for each page in order to determine the quality of your website. Not bothering with these tags could damage your chances with the search engines.

5. Keyword Stuffing

We all know you are keen to rank highly for your chosen keywords however cramming them into your title and all over your web page will not be a good thing. If your keyword appears too often it will look like spam and the search engines won't like your website. The 3% rule is fairly good to use but see what your competitors do, if they use it in about 6% of their content then that will be good for you but don‘t go over that. If they only use it about 2% of the time then you should stick to that rule. It will vary for every industry and keyword.

There are plenty of things to avoid when putting your website together but the above are our top tip. Stick to them and you should be well on your way to a search engine friendly website. To find out more visit our website optimisation page or contact us.