But Dave (self-taught novice Web designer) was sure he had done everything right! A cool domain name, an eye-catching Flash intro, beautiful dynamic popup menus, and lots of keywords in each page! Not to mention the standardized anchor text to make it easy on both the search engines and human eyes. So where was the traffic? The company endured a month of painful inactivity after the site launch, then retained a different designer.
Could this be you? How can you prevent such an embarrassing fiasco?
The trouble was, what Dave thought was important and cool was actually anti-SEO. What he should have been paying attention to, he ignored without even knowing it.
Here are some of the pitfalls he fell into that you can avoid.
1. Choosing a domain name that tickles your fancy without serious keyword research.
Users search for things in particular ways that often are counterintuitive and unpredictable. That’s why we do keyword research. We need to find out what people do, not what we think they do. Then we need to use that knowledge in our domain name as well as our title sections, h1/h2 tags, and so on.
2. Making a Flash intro your home page.
Search engines like Google search the text content in websites and rank the websites partly based on the text found. Flash is not text and is therefore not easily searchable. You want each page on your site to contribute the maximum toward being found and then converting visits into action. If you are a famous TV network’s website, this does not apply to you.
3. Using javascript menus without either html alternatives or good site maps.
Google as yet can’t read javascript very well. You have to design your website for both human visitors and search engines. Leave one of them out of the equation and the visitor counts may not add up for you.
4. Stuffing keywords into your pages to make the search engines think you’re relevant.
You may be relevant, don’t get me wrong, but search engines are getting smarter by the day. They outwitted linkwheels and roboblogs. If they see too many keywords in your site’s pages, they may jump to the unwarranted conclusion that those keywords are spam. That would be counter-productive for your site.
5. Leaving the same old anchor text in links.
Gone are the days when you could simply say “Click here” for a link. Now, human readers expect better and the search engines also use that anchor text as a clue to the relevance of your links. If they spot a redundant mismatch like “Click here”, no one may ever find your site in order to “Click there”!
Now you know more than a still-large percentage of the website designing population. Use this knowledge to rise above your competition and share your message with the world.
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