Five Deadly Mistakes That Ruin Search Engine Optimization
When building a website, it is important to be meticulous in every
minute detail in the steps you take in doing so. Your website must have
a good pageload time and perform efficiently for the web crawlers. Here
are five deadly mistakes for you to avoid when building a website that
destroy SEO:
- Stay Away From “Splash Pages” or “Welcome Pages” -- Do not use a page such as a welcome screen, or have a page that says “click here to enter” as your homepage. The lack of content on these types of pages will get your page rank buried super fast. Have your rich and relevant content on the home page.
- Avoid Using Too Many Banner Advertisements -- The overuse of banner advertisements turns off your potential visitors/customers, as well as the search engines. Relevant content is key, along with subtle advertisements – not the other way around. If you are found guilty of doing so by the search engines, you will be considered a spam site or a "banner farm."
- Do Not Leave Your Site Unorganized
- Providing a user-friendly navigation menu is key. The use of drop-down menus are useless, if your visitor has no idea how to wade through the pages of your site. Having a good menu system is easy to follow for the web crawlers, as well as your potential visitors.
- Do Not Forget To Have A “You Are Here” Point
- On every page of your website, there should be some sort of indication of where a visitor is within the navigation of your page. Without it, the visitor will leave confused – this is known as a click-out. An excess amount of click-outs will adversely affect your rankings.
- Do Not Use Background or Auto-played Audio Files On Your Site
Web crawlers rate your site on the amount of time it takes for it to load(pageload). Audio takes an excessive amount of time to download, so if the web crawler goes to your site and your page will not load within 7-10 seconds, it will leave, and you possibly will have your page buried due to inconvenience and inaccessibility.