When most new webmasters start building their web pages, they don’t give much of a thought to Search Engine Optimization. What does this mean? It means they could be building pages which are unfriendly to search engines. The search engines are one of the best ways to get free traffic, and to save time and hassle, there are certain things to avoid so that your site is ranked well without spending months on end trying to optimize your page. Here are five things you must avoid to prevent getting in trouble with the search engines: 1. Never Keyword Spam Don’t spam or hide your pages with the keywords you are attempting to target. Search engines are smarter nowadays and can smell your intentions from afar. If they think you are spamming, your site could be penalized badly in the rankings or even removed from their listings. 2. Don’t Use Frames Websites which have frames are also unfriendly to search engines and will prevent from getting a good ranking. Try to avoid using frames whenever possible. A good tip is to add "no frames" tags between the “Head†tags. 3. Don’t Use Flash Or Javascript If possible, refrain from using Flash or Javascript elements. These dynamic scripts don’t contain much content in terms of words and the search engines generally do not like them. If in doubt, always put content ahead of fancy graphics or effects. Besides, your visitors will love you for it. 4. Don’t Submit Your Site Too Often A few people I know, who after finding that their site was not indexed after one week, re-submitted their site to the search engines. This is not recommended! If you do this too often, the search engines will think you are spamming. 5. Never Use Unrelated Keywords In Your Meta Tags If you are selling sofa sets, don’t place the name of a popular person or product in your “Keywords†meta tag. Some webmasters use popular keywords in their meta tags in an attempt to attract more traffic, but this does not work, as the search engines only look at their relevance to your web page. If you sell sofas, place only words related to sofas in your meta tag. Avoid these five pitfalls that a lot of new webmasters make, and you can prevent your site from suffering an early search engine death. After all, as the cliché goes, prevention is better than cure! Fabian
I think having other pages redirect to your target page also hurts. I had an old site and new site mixed together and set up the old pages to redirect to the new pages. My traffic from Google died. Once I cleaned up the redirects and older pages everything returned to normal.
Never happened to me....I use redirects all the time.....the traffic slows down for maybe 2 weeks and then slowly returns to normal.
Redirects, the 301 variety are an important SEO tool. They prevent duplicate content, 404 errors and pass link equity through the old URL to the new address. When first set-up there can be a rankings slip as link equity is passed, one crawled link at a time, from the old URL to the new URL. Think of it as pouring water from one glass into another; for awhile both glasses will have less water than a full glass. Eventually the water, or link equity, is completely transfered and the new glass/URL is filled.