Getting Found on the Web: What Not to Do
With the amount of content on the Web growing every day, it’s tougher than ever to get a good listing on a search engine. Launching a Web site that could not be found in any of the search engines would be like setting up business and not listing your phone number. The major search engines are like the white pages. Your new site may be beautiful and interactive, but if the search engines can’t find it, you’ll never get a visitor to your business card on the internet.
Lets go over some common mistakes many sites make.
Graphic Intensive Home Pages
One of the major issue is using a graphic to display copy. Search engines can not read text contained in graphics. If your web site presents the majority of its information in imagery, search engines have no content to index. Try to keep your navigation and your content as HTML text. And for every image, be sure to include a good description, or title, in the ALTernative attribute of the image tag.
Frames
At one time, frames helped reduce the overhead of downloading common navigation elements and contact information, as well as placing those elements in a common area of each page. But frames cause several problems. First, not every search engine can follow split frames to index all of the information displayed in your 'content' frame. Second, frames prevent visitors from setting a bookmark in their browser to a page deeper in your site. For the same reason, search engines are often not able to link to your internal pages.
Most professionals concur: "Don’t use frames in your Web design unless you absolutely have to use them." If you must have frames in your design, the NO FRAMES tag is your best hope for getting ranked higher.
404 Not Found Errors
The Web is a place that changes and grows daily. Pages are added and removed from Web sites. However, if an internal page of your Web site attains a high ranking with a search engine and then that page is taken down at a later date, what happens to that ranking? For a while it remains as it is, and a visitor who requests that page will receive a server generated 404 NOT FOUND error. Eventually the search engine will revisit the page to see if it still exists and if any content has changed. When it finds that page can’t be found, it instantly drops the page listing and ranking from its index. But, if you set the server configuration of your web site to present a predetermined page of your own design, you can prevent the 404 NOT FOUND error. For example, try this http://www.designbig.com/ducksncabbage URL, and you get a message that the page was not found. But, we still have our BIG navigation links, as well as our “look & feel.” However, on many Web sites you would receive the server generated 404 NOT FOUND error — a dead end in cyberspace.
Poor Keyword Use
Many sites use an invisible META tag to give a description, keywords and other information to search engines about a particular page. There are two ways to improve your ranking for a page. The first is obvious, choose a good set of keywords. Use as many as you can that are relevant to the content on that page. Second, do not use commas to separate your keywords. Use spaces. Commas make search engines consider each keyword individually, but most people don’t use single words on their searches. (Try the word 'design' on Google -- nearly a quarter of a billion results.) By leaving out the commas, the search engine will consider several possible combinations of keywords and possibly generate more traffic.
By designing and programming your Web site with the above considerations in mind, you improve your chances of being found on the internet. Being indexed by search engines vastly increases traffic to your site, and more traffic can lead to more business.