The reason any business creates a website is to make people notice their business, come and have a look around their website and ultimately to become paying customers. Yet far too many people keep sticking roadblocks in the way of the search engine spiders. By making it difficult for the spiders to crawl a website, you do your business great harm. The internet is too competitive for any business to deliberately keep the spiders from doing their job.

Images and frames

Spiders cannot read images, so embedding text in images make it unreadable. The only way the spiders can read the text is by using an ALT-tag. The subject of images brings us to Flash. Your gorgeous Flash based website is useless to the spiders, they cannot see it. Limit Flash and if you insist on having a completely Flash based website, create an alternative text based website for the spiders to read to enable them to index the content.

Websites that are primarily frame-based create a rather huge problem for the search engine spiders. When you surround your text with frames, you are closing the door for the spiders to read the text inside the frames. Removing the frames allow the spiders to read the text that has been optimised.

Content taboos

Not having enough web content in the form of text is a sure-fire way for the spiders to start ignoring your site. The spiders need content and they want fresh content regularly. This is the only way to get your web pages indexed. Article writing is an excellent way to get keyword rich content onto your website. A huge roadblock for the spiders is when you place your free content behind a login requiring a password. This may be a safety measure, but you harm your SEO efforts greatly because the spiders cannot get past the login page.

Linking

Site visitors do not want to slave away at navigating your website; they lose patience and leave if it takes them two clicks or more to get to different pages within your website. If your website navigation is poor and your inter-linking shoddy, you will pick up problems with the search engine spiders as well.

You are obstructing them from crawling your site properly and that will lead to them not indexing the pages they have difficulty in reaching. On the subject of links; keep your directory structure to maximum two levels, for deep directory structure results in extremely long URLs. Other website owners are not keen to link to websites with enormously long URLs.

Search engine optimisation is an ongoing process; constant updating, tweaking of keywords and keyword phrases and analysis. Looking over the ways mentioned here that create roadblocks that stops the spiders from crawling, it can be seen where problems are.

Fixing these problems will immediately boost your SEO efforts. With a streamlined website that functions well, optimisation becomes a maintenance task instead of constantly fixing problems. Competing online is intense and no business can afford to undermine its own SEO efforts.

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