Splash Page Many people put up just a big banner image and a link "Click here to enter" on their homepage. The worst case -- the "enter" link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.This is fine if you don't care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you're making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website's highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages. Non-spiderable Flash Menus Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can't be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed. Image and Flash Content Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can't read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image. Overuse of Ajax A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because, ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.Another disadvantage of Ajax -- since the address URL doesn't reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends. Versioning of Theme Design For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (i.e. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking. "Click Here" Link Anchor Text You probably see this a lot where people use "Click here" or "Learn more" as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for "Click Here". But, if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use, that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It's much more descriptive (and relevant) to say "learn more about {keyword topic}" Warning: Don't use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.
Yeah agree, these are pretty basic aspects, which everbody seems to follow these days. Thanks for sharing though, will be great for newbies though!
If splash page is just spiderable text/descriptive images then it should be fine for search engine indexing.
I agree with these points..............but designers and developers can not be SEOs so don't blame them...........because we also need to do some work...........
Your discussion on "Click Here" Link Anchor Text is promising. Most of us simply use Click Here to show the links. It should be replaced by the keyword variation.
Use of Nested tables and over use of Java Scripts is also a bigger problem which creates problem for SE crawlers in crawling a website efficiently.
Can some point me to an example of an ajax menu structure? I use X8 Evolution to build my web pages which presents the navigation buttons that move down as the page is scrolled down. Is this such an example?
Every site have some phase such as get a hosting, then designing, develpoing then finally seo. So you can not blame that developer will do the seo of the site. It is right that developer generally set 'click here' and need to put there some keyword. But he do not actually know about the righ business keyword then untill and unless he puting the wrong keyword. No seo will do the designing and also do not resolve the hosting related query. But it possible that he may change or modify the designing or development at some extent. As same as no developer will do the exact seo which a seo expert will do by his proper research of his market to select the right keyword for optimization.
"Click Here" Link Anchor Text You probably see this a lot where people use "Click here" or "Learn more" as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for "Click Here". But, if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use, that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It's much more descriptive (and relevant) to say "learn more about {keyword topic}" Yes - and no - from a purely SEO point of view of course you're right, but from a usability point of view- users react to the most obvious 'call to action', a more seo-friendly keyword rich approach can be overlooked.
I agree with everything you said except for this one. Wikipedia has tons of internal links using the same anchor text, such as using the anchor text "Sun" to provide links towards the article about the Sun from articles about "Solar System", "Earth", "Milkyway", "nuclear fusion", etc. The last time I checked, Wikipedia is still the #1 in search results for the search query "Sun".
I see the anchor text mistake all the time. Although, I must say, "Click Here" is great anchor text to use when you don't want to give a website good anchor text but still want to link to it.