SEO mistakes you need to avoid

SEO tips

Below are 8 SEO tips that can come in useful to any webmaster:

• Frames. Pages use frames as “containers” to hold the actual content of the page; unfortunately, spiders cannot see into that content, making it appear the page contains no keywords, content, or other spider food.

• Forms. Because bots cannot fill out forms or click on submit buttons, don’t require forms to be filled out in order to reach the pages you want indexed. If you have content behind forms that needs to be indexed, make sure you provide alternative links for the spiders to crawl.

• Cookies. Search engines do not accept cookies. However, if you must require cookies, then follow this advice from Google: “Configure your webservers to not serve the registration page to our crawlers (when the User-Agent is “Googlebot”). You can verify that the request is actually from our robot by making sure the IP address is within the range of 66.249.64.0/20.” Please visit Google Webmaster Central for more information.

• Search Boxes. Don’t require that keywords to be typed into your search box to find all of your pages, because search engines simply can’t type. Always provide direct links to all of your pages.

• Flash. Because search engine spiders cannot read Flash, they can’t see all of that great animation your visitors can see. A flash banner or window is OK, but do not place your entire page in Flash, and especially don’t put your links and keyword content in Flash. Create alternative text links and keyword-rich text below the Flash for spiders to use to index your page.

• Session IDs. If you use session IDs and other techniques that generate multiple identical pages, you risk making it possible for spiders to get a different URL for the same page every time they access your site. Spiders may spend too much time trying to index useless pages on your site and not enough time indexing your important pages, thus resulting in depressing your site’s overall PageRank by spreading it out over vast numbers of pointless pages.

• Duplicate Content. Avoid excessive duplicate content on your site. For example, if you are selling men’s shoes, don’t create a different page for each shoe color. Also, don’t point more than one URL to a single page of content. Finally, direct thedomain.com to www.thedomain.com.

• Complicated URLs. Search engines, especially MSN, still have trouble with long URLs with lots of ?’s, &’s and =’s. The URL should be as short and descriptive as possible to ensure the bots index and rank your page appropriately.

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admin @ March 13, 2008