5 Things to Avoid if You Want to Rank High on Google

ZekeLL

5 Things to Avoid if You Want to Rank High on Google

An effective website design not only is appealing to the
eyes but also to the search engines. This is a list of the most common mistakes
that web designers make and why they should be avoided at all cost.

Using tables for the
layout

Use divs for layout, not tables. Tables add a lot of unnecessary code to your
pages and search engines don’t like them.

Using frames

Don’t ever use frames. Google and Yahoo hate them. It’s a horrible way to
structure a website.

Putting text inside
imagesSearch engines can’t read the text inside a picture. You need content to
rank high on the search engines and that means plain text.


Making the whole
website in Flash
Flash is great for animations and some headers. But when your website is
100% Flash, there is no text for the search engines to read!



Not doing a basic
optimization

All the content on a website needs to be optimized for the search engines.
Put your keywords in the title, meta keywords tag, meta description tag, alt
tags, and H1 and H2 tags. Get a sitemap that links to all the pages on your
website. And never stop adding quality content.
Now, if you want a website that will rank high on search
engines but don’t want to do it yourself or don’t know how to do it, look for a
great web design agency that knows about Search Engine Optimization and can
create an optimized website for you at no extra cost.
There are not a lot of them out there, but I am sure you can
find one.
Feel free to contact me with your web design related
questions.
ZekeLL10/16/2008 5:51 PM

ZekeLL

Craig, you`re right. Working with tables is a lot easier. But I can tell you that there`s nothing that you can do with tables that you can`t do with divs.
It would be great if we didn`t have to think about search engines at all. It would make our life a lot easier. But they are a huge part of any online marketing strategy and most people can`t afford to ignore this fact.
Tables are great for tabular data (charts) but not for website layout. That being said, you are right, it took all designers a long time to get used to.
Have a good one.

RockyMoore

Craig, you`re right. Working with tables is a lot easier. But I can tell you that there`s nothing that you can do with tables that you can`t do with divs....

 
Um, do you have a way that you can have multiple columns on a page which each column having a different background color and with various heights of content in different columns and still have all columns have their background color fill out to the bottom of the containing box without resorting to Javascript, that is cross browser (IE 6-8, Firefox 2-3, Opera)?
 
This is one of several areas that DIVs are plain a pain to use because verticle height does not work well in different browsers and a simple table just works. 
 
For 99.5% of the time though, I do agree with a DIV structure for flexibility, compactness and being more search engine friendly.  Another note in this area is to use external Cascading Style Sheets to lighten the load of a page and make it easier for search engines to index, not have those style settings scattered around on the HTML elements of the page.  It also produces a design that is much easier to maintain.

ZekeLL

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