Some aspects of your website and the optimisation thereof you as the website owner have control over. You can manipulate many of these aspects to give you a helping hand in getting better ratings. In the same breath; there are a myriad of factors that can cause you to do poorly in the search engine rankings.

Some factors may only hamper your website and business a little bit. Some of these can be disastrous though, and can quite easily be described as ‘the best possible ways to commit website suicide’. If you avoid these pitfalls or fix them as soon as possible, you have a good chance of ranking well in search results.

Content and navigation

It is not impossible for a website to rank well with only a small amount of content. The moral of the story though is that the less textual content you have the fever keywords you have. This makes it extremely difficult, as you have few opportunities for keyword ranking. Stuffing your web pages with random text to be able to fit in keywords helps absolutely nothing.

Also remember that image text looks good to humans, but not to the search engines. Design the navigation of your website well, or suffer the consequences. Today Flash navigation is not the huge problem it was before, but spiders are stopped dead by form fields and Java Scripts.

Links without ALT text or that has images is a no-no. Images mean nothing to the search engines, they need that ALT text. Too many links confuse the search engines form understanding what your website is all about, so be careful with over-linking.

Websites built completely in Flash

The contents of websites that are built in Flash can be indexed by the search engines, but not if the site is completely Flash. What happens is that because fully Flash websites do not have an architectural framework. This means there are no individual pages, so pages cannot be indexed. This means poor performance in ranking for keywords. With distinct pages each page can be indexed for its specific group of keywords. With a Flash site this becomes impossible. With a Flash site it does not work to try and cram all your keywords into one page either.

Pages that are duplicated content

A huge mistake made especially by e-commerce websites is duplication. This happens easily when products are put in more than one category and then having URLs that are dynamically generated. This creates chaos where a website with 15 products can end up having 75 pages that are mostly duplication. All the search engines see is page upon page of duplicated content when they start indexing the pages.

This is the fastest way the search engine crawlers will wash their hands of your website and simply leave. From here on the errors start piling up with wrong URL indexing until there is a huge amount of chaos. In the end each of your web pages lose their effectiveness and your search engine rankings suffer hugely.

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