What Not To Do With Your Website

There are a few tricks that's have been used in the past in an attempt to raise a websites profile and page rank. Some of these worked for a while but it wasn't long before the search engines realised what was going on and now try to avoid listing such content or blacklisting websites completely.

These are a few of the tricks we have seen alogn the way and suggest you don't try them.

Duplicate Content

Don't copy content directly from other sites or use content that will be copied by other sites i.e product descriptions from a manufacturers catalogue. Copied content just doesn't do anything for you. Try to write your own original content and have a think about how your customers or website visitors might be searching for this information and include these words in the pages.

Keyword Spamming

Key word spamming is where you would enter a certain term many many times in the page in an attempt that the search engines will think that your page has to be the very best resource on this subject. Although in the distant past this seemed to have an effect no you are very likely to plummet down the listings never to be seen again. Just write good human content but allow for the key words you think people will use in searches.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are where you create a page specifically for search engines with carefully placed keywords often in text that makes no sense to a human reading it. These became popular after keyword spamming became obsolete. Many of the pages still exist and seem to work to a degree but are in the list of Google's bad practices. The worst case is you page or site would be blacklisted. We are not sure how long it takes to become un-blacklisted but we am sure its not a good place to be.

Hidden Links

Hidden links are often used to link to doorway pages and are often at the foot of web pages in the same colour as the background or in a font size too small to read.

Slow Loading Pages

Today its not as much of a problem with faster servers and larger band width but we still see sites that have huge images resized in the HTML code to fit the page but take forever to load even with a fast broad band connection. All images should be reduced to 72 dots per inch and be the exact size that they are shown on the website.

Make sure the code of your website is as economical as possible and error free. How much HTML errors effect the search engines ability to crawl is not really known but errors do show up when using different browsers and platforms so your human visitor will have no confidence in a website that has errors.

Choosing a good hosting Hosting company is essential to how you website is delivered to your users. Making sure the hosting is professional, fast, in a data centre and reasonable value are all things to consider. At peek times you may see that your site loads much slower. If your website doesn't load quickly some search engine robots will go away and not come back and users will get fed up with slow loading pages and simply pick another website.