Mistakes That Hurt Web Page Ranking

The following are a list of mistakes can ensure that your site maintains a low ranking with the search engines. Avoid at all costs.

Specifying no title for your webpage

I can't stress how important the title of a web page is. Failing to specify a descriptive, keyword optimized title will do untold damage to your ranking with the search engines. It's the equivalent to owning a shop and boarding up its windows. Ideally each page on your website should have a unique, content-specific title.

Excessive use of images or Flash animation on a page

If your web page has a lot of nice-looking images and eye-popping Flash animation and not a great deal of textual content it may indeed look nice but have you ever considered what how the search engines might see it.

Search engines thrive on textual content, scavenging as much text as they can but unfortunately they can't understand images or Flash animations like we can and so will find nothing of real value on your webpage. Try to balance your page so the textual content is given priority and that any images or animations are used only when required. Also it's a great idea to attach some text to an image by using its ALT tag as search engines use this text when determining rank.

Complicated menu systems

Search engines spiders that crawl through our pages are a relatively crude group. They find in difficult to navigate complicated menu systems implemented for example in JavaScript or as a Java applet. Just as it's easy for a human to navigate through the site never assume it is going to be as easy for a search engine spider. A menu system using simple textual links will be easier for a spider to comprehend and it'll have the ability to successfully navigate your website. Plenty of the time complex menu systems can be reproduced using textual links and CSS.

If you have to use a complex menu system make certain to offer a site map that is clearly accessible from the homepage of your website and contains only textual links to your webpages. This ensures that even if the spider can't understand your menu system it will have the ability to find the pages on your website.