Shedding light on good SEO practice can take you a long way towards success, ignorance in the world of SEO is not excuse and carries with it quite serious consequences such as losses financially as well as reputation.

1.    Black Hat techniques are frowned on very seriously.  Whatever search engine you trust with your indexing, make sure you know their rules and regulations fully and stick to them.
2.    Don’t rely on Paid Search Advertising either as most people don’t get it right and a lot more have the idea that if they concentrate on buying advertising they wont have to focus on SEO.  While this method can be an effective means of targeting audiences, nothing replaces organic search engine optimisation in the long run and if you do go down this route it is advisable that you target advertising that has the ability to find the people you are looking for instead of using paid search campaigns.
3.    Don’t use graphics for text links. Using graphics to represent a link is a highly visible method of getting attention but most major search engines don’t have a clue whether a graphic link refers to a specific web page or whether it points to something else.  Search engines need good old fashioned words in plain text and if it is not possible to exclude graphics, then you should include a set of text links somewhere on the web page.
4.    Forgo using frames as search engines have a hard time indexing website that use frames in their design.  Frames use several different HTML files to display only one page and will usually only index the first file they find, ignoring the others.  Power Users or people that use the internet as their main means of research and buying will avoid framed sites.
5. Entry or index pages that ask the user to “enter’ are called Splash Pages and are not good.  These pages are usually highly graphic or animated and as the index page is the first one read by search engines it is far better to make them readable.  Most of the time the only content included on these pages is the words “skip intro” which then redirects visitors to the main home page.  Search engines do not like redirect commands, they want content and lots of it.
6.    If you don’t clearly define your action points then you are making a mistake in your design which can have negative effects on SEO.  You need to clearly define what your objectives are, what the reason for your site is; and who your audience are. What actions are they required to do once they have landed on your site.  If you don’t take these points into consideration before designing your website, you run the risk of providing a poor experience for your users.  Without action points your visitors will not be able to tell what the purpose of your site is, or how to navigate around it, they are left to their own devices and this is pointless.

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