12 Mistakes that Can Kill Your Search Engine Ranking

Are You Committing Search Engine Suicide? This Article reveals the TOP 12 Mistakes that can kill your search engine listing faster then you can shake a stick

With so many sites trying so hard to break into the coveted top 10 listings within in the search engines, you simply can't afford to make any mistakes. Any mistakes you do make can drastically affect your ranking in the search engines. You might be committing search engine suicide and not even know it.

Here are the top 12 mistakes that can kill your search engine rankings

1. Using a 'Splash' Page: A splash page is usually a visual introduction for your visitor when they come to your site. It’s usually some kind of graphic; the most common form of a splash page is “flash animation”. These may look cool, and you may have spent a lot of money on them or time in designing that ultra cool looking animation but they don’t help you at all in getting listed. Splash pages rarely contain any content that can be indexed; and usually just get ignored by the search engine spiders. It’s best to avoid them. Think about it for a moment, what’s the point of having a page up on your site that isn’t going to get indexed. It’s just a waste of time and bandwidth. Instead create a front page that is focused on content. Do proper keyword research; focus the goal of your entire page within that front page. Give your visitors what they want and fast when they arrive to your site. Focus the page with these keywords throughout the page on your links, headlines etc, and create compelling information and articles about the topics

2. Using Frames: Never make a website with frames. Search engine robots cannot index pages with frames. For this reason never, ever use frames on your sites. I know it may be tempting to use them on the navigational parts of your page, but don’t bother spiders don’t like frames.

3. Drop Down Menus: Drop down navigational menus might be cool, but search engine robots have a hard time following the links on these kinds of menus. This means that if you have chosen to use this style of menu for the navigation of your site, then you risk a large majority of your site as being un-indexable by the spiders. Instead use text links for navigation. Stay away from java script to or any other scripting method to build or display links.

4. Forcing Cookies: Search engine crawlers cannot store cookies. If your site requires cookies before a visitor can navigate, the site will be simply inaccessible to the search engines. Forcing cookies is never a good idea anyways, and most people will have certain level of security in their browsers against it anyways. The moral of the story here is easy; don’t force the use of cookies on your site.

5. Forcing JavaScript to be enabled: Search engine spiders cannot respond to anything within JavaScript. Also this most likely won’t be appreciated by your visitor very well either, since he may have a certain level of security against active scripts in his/her browser. If your site uses JavaScript to create and display navigation and or other form elements, you may be making your site invisible to the search engines. Try to keep javascript to a minimum. Don’t use it to generate links, or navigation menus. To test if your site has this problem, turn off JavaScript in your browser, and try to view your site without it. In doing so, you will see what errors pop up on your page and you’ll also get an idea as to how the search engines are viewing your page.

6. Excessively Long URLs: You what I mean here link’s that are longer then there are days in the week. If the pages within your site are 'created via a scripting language’ and database, be careful about the size of your links.  Page links with excessively long URL’s make it difficult for search engines to crawl through your site. Whenever possible, use static pages to display your content. Try to avoid really long links and use links that are short and relatively direct in language.

7. Pop-Ups: Search engines despise pop-up especially on your home page. Not to mention your visitor most likely doesn’t like them either. I know I don’t. Personally I don’t care how relevant a page is or how much good content is on there, using a pop up simply cheapens that value of that page. They are mainly used as a tool to gather and build email lists. Their ability has waned in collecting quality subscribers over the years due to their annoying inherit nature. Eliminating pop-up ads altogether and you will win favor not only with the search engines but also your visitors.

8. Unique Title Tags on every page on your site: The title tag on your web pages is the number one thing used by the search engines to identify the content of your page. Since most spiders treat every page as different on your site as opposed to treating your site as a whole, failing to use different title pages on each and every page within your site only diminishes your contents value. Use unique title tags on each and every webpage. Make them keyword focused for the content that is also on that page and the spiders will love you.

9. Alt Tags: Search engine robots cannot read any text that might appear within a graphic or image on your page. This means any important text that you want to display as a graphic, won’t be read by the search engines. This is where people make use of the Alt Tag. Alt tags allow you to create short text within a graphics image. The search engine spiders will see this information and also use it to evaluate your content.  Always use Alt tags when displaying images on your site. But, be careful that you do not overdo this. Doing so can be seen as keyword stuffing. Excessive use of alt tags is just as bad as not using them, so try to also include words like ‘image’ within the alt tag to help avoid keyword stuffing.

10. Lack of Meaningful Content: Search engines scan the text that is on your home page and then they try to figure out what your site is all about. During this process, the search engine spiders and robots reads all the text, and throws away all the common words (a, the, and, or, etc.), It also tends to discard “sales oriented words”, like “buy now” etc. With the remaining words and phrases it tries to determine what is actually relevant on your page. If your page contains mostly fluff, or a lot of images, or you’ve only created a mini landing page the search engines may not rank your site as you would have hoped. Avoid creating a lot of fluff and keep your sales pitches relevant and in spots where you visitor expects to see them. Use words and phrases that are specific to your topic. If you’re creating landing pages for affiliate programs, make them have value. Include a couple articles; give your visitor more content then just a simple mini page.

11. Using Page Redirects: This is one of the big No-No’s when it comes to search engines. They frown upon people who practice using page re-directs. Using page redirects has a use like forwarding someone who is inquiring about your product, subscribing to your newsletter etc but it shouldn’t be on your main page. Instead create some content and keep the redirects to a minimum and never use them on your main page.

12. Submitting your Site to Link Farms: Submitting your site to link farms can have long lasting negative effect with the search engines. Engines like Google look at link farms as spam and may actually remove websites from their rankings that submit to these link farms. In case you aren’t familiar with what “link farms” are well link farms are 'search engine submission' sites that promise to submit your URL to thousands of search engines instantly. In most cases, these sites will submit your site to link farms (containing thousands of links). These sites were very common a few years ago; they are simply pages with rotating links on them. So when someone submits a link the bottom guy on the list is removed. These link pages typically hold hundreds of links. Stay away from these free submission sites. Not only will it hurt your search engine ranking, but you’ll be swamped with spam from all the emails as a result of the link farms.

There you have it the top 12 mistakes to avoid in order grabbing a better ranking. There is nothing that isn’t very difficult to avoid here, but these mistakes are actually very common. Learning to apply a good solid SEO plan with your site will go a long way towards improving your ranking with the search engines.