Seo Survey – How Satisfied Are You With Your Search Engine Optimisation November 12, 2009 at 9:58 am
Okay, so you think you know it all. You’ve just got your online business up and running, successfully to top it all. Proper research was conducted on all facets of the project, endless hours were put in and sleepless nights spent on check and re-checking silky smooth system operation. You called in the assistance of only the best web design team in town. You site content is up-to-date, fun, offers great products, and you even outsourced SEO to real pro’s in the game. Your website is ranked number one Google for it perfect keyword usage. Business is better than ever, and finally all your hard work is paying off. Mmm, how about taking a well deserved break from the hustle and bustle of business? Everything is going according to plan, honestly- What on earth can go wrong?
The first day on your well deserved holiday is awesome – lounging, snorkeling, eating, and nightclubbing with celebs and moguls. Suddenly your hotel bedside phone rings at 1:00 AM, you think it must be a minor detail. While in actual fact it’s your top notch web designer, who signed in to make a few small site updates and found what he describes as the biggest disaster to hit the internet. In a mere day, your online business has gone from being the cat’s whiskers to nothing. Both old and new clients are fading away, you’ve dropped from number one, page one on Google to number 5 on page ten, and your once substantial income stream has totally dried up.
Unbelievable? Believe it! This type of disaster is as common as flu and frequently takes anything from months to years to fix the problems, if ever. A lot of things can go wrong, but an unattended business website can completely result in permanent business failure, in the wink of an eye. In the ever changing world of SEO, it’s of utmost importance to have the right team back-up. After all, you don’t want to sit and watch everything 24/7/365 all by your lonesome. This is the reason why you need to be fully aware of how to avoid the most common SEO pitfalls, is so essential.
Image-overloaded site content- Are you the owner of a website that’s packed to the rafters with high resolution pictures of every single item you have on offer? Yes, yes it may look great, but there’s no ALT text in other words that text which is displayed in case of a missing image, most major search engines including Google, Yahoo will not understand the images. An image of a written line and an image of a cat will look exactly the same for the search engines. It’s thus recommended that you have very specific ALT text for all your images.
Javascript loaded site content- You should keep in mind that javascript interpretation by Search engines is still in its teething-stages. Should you decide to opt for text and link concealment behind javascript, chances are very good that it will make it totally invisible to the engines.
Flash sites- Flash sites are simply interactive movies, which search engines also find very difficult to recognize. Web designers love using Flash as a tool to express their artistic generous. Unfortunately, it results in unreadable content, not for human beings but rather search engines.
Unethical SEO practices- The inclusion of 100`s of key words and phrases on your site to increase your search engine rankings, is so last season not to mention so unethical. If links were considered votes, can’t you just buy them just as you would during elections? Yes, you can, if you’re tendering for search index banning. If you’re doing your own SEO, keep in mind that your SEO should appear as natural as practically possible.
There’s absolutely no doubt in the fact that we are all proud and love our websites and try our best to see them through to success. Unfortunately, we do often overlook their faults, thinking that it will just go away. Surprise! It won’t! Or perhaps you forked out an arm and a leg for a professional website designer to create something exquisite. It should already be SEO-optimized, right? Wrong!
Other SEO pitfalls include:
Server downtime or unreliability. If a search engine finds it impossible to index your site when called for, you are going to be dead in the water. Check and re-check that your server and hosting services provider is totally reliable and make sure that some shape or form of alert is set when your site encounters problems or is offline.
Site hacking. Hackers love to add links to all kinds of trashy sites selling pornography, drugs, and casinos when they get a toe in or rather hack into your money-maker. Chances are that it will be too late to prevent a substantial loss in site traffic by the time you get a malicious site alert from one of the major search engines such as Google. Most of these popular search engines will proactively eliminate any site considered malicious from their search results. It’s thus essential to check that your site is 100% secure and have a monitor in place for any shape or form of defacement.
Testing your server live – Okay you’ve made necessary alterations and changes to your server, but did you block the test server with a decently configured robots.txt file? If not, you brace yourself for some serious copy content problems.
No robots.txt file – This may appear to be a very small problem but it’s frequently overlooked consideration. I’ve seen loads of sites removed from major search engine indexes due to robots.txt file inaccessibility as a result of non-existence. A 500 error on the robots.txt file will render the rest of the site down. The resolution, throw up a 3 line robots.txt file et voila.
So we want to know how you have done with your website. Complete our ongoing 8 question SEO Survey and we will send you a case file from one of our live clients websites. We will show you exactly what we have done, what worked, what did not, ‘warts an all’. This will get updated along with our Survey results on a monthly basis. As we have offices in the UK, USA and Australia we are making this a global event.
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