SEO Paper

Navigation build with Javascript/DHTML

A mistake that is made by many webmasters and company websites is that they don’t understand, that a spider can’t read a javascript or DHTML Navigation.The same effect could be built using Cascading Style Sheets.

Framesets

Problems that could occur through the use of framsets

• No use of the noframe tag, search engines don’t follow links in the no frame tag
• If the visitor visits a webpage, you have to load the navigation (e.g use javascripts)

Framesets are rarely used, since the development of PHP (includes for navigation), CSS (for design), and Content Managment Systems provide better possibilities.

Flash websites

Many web design companies love to create flash websites. Flash looks good and provides many possibilities for a webdesigner to show the user that he knows his subject, but there is one big disadvantage with Flash technology in respect to search engines.

Search engines usually can’t index flash websites, because there is no text which spiders can read.
If you are using a flash website, you should consider

• Add text in comments, so that search engines can read it
• Try to gain links to your flash webpage, and focus on off the page SEO criteria
• If possible, ask your webdesigner to provide an alternative website consisting of HTML content, for users that have disabled Flash animation in their browsers

Using formats that are not supported by search engines

You should take into consideration that search engine spiders only index formats like .htm, .php, .pdf, and many more, so you should only use supported formats.

Using Stopwords/Blacklist words

Almost every search engine has an own black list/stopword list, where there are words that are not indexed by the search engine. You should try and not use a lot of this words, like “and, or..” to often, because search engines avoid to index webpages with black list words on them. There are no open “black lists” where you can see which words are on the lists of the different search engines.

Cookies/Log In

If there are special areas on your website, that can only be accessed through login in, you should take into consideration that a search engine bot, like Googlebot, cannot do so. Many forum webmasters make the mistake that the posts can only be read by registered members.

This does not only prevent possibly visitors from seeing what is going on and what the discussions are about, it also prevents the search engine bot from indexing your content and generate new visitors from search engine result pages.

Errors in your Robots.txt

Another mistake is to use a Robots.txt page which prevents search engine spiders from indexing your entire website.

Through the Robots.txt document, you can “tell” robots/spiders like the Googlebot, which parts of your website they are allowed to index.

If you don’t provide a Robots.txt, every bot is allowed to index everything.

Example Robots.txt #1

User Agent: *
Disallow: /

This prevents every bot from indexing your webpage. If you are using this Robots.txt information, your website will not be indexed by search engines.

Example Robots.txt #2

User Agent: *

Disallow:

This Robots.txt information allows all bots to index every webpage on your website.