“Enough!” said Watson.
“Holmes, I presume you are aware that I have considerable expertise in SEO techniques.” He continued. “I find your list quite ridiculous in the sense that most SEO experts know what they’re doing and so they don’t need this long list of non-issues.”
Sherlock Holmes smiled. “Watson, I find your indignant tone quite amusing. In fact, given the lack of assiduousness on the part of most human beings, it is imperative that a list like this be provided to mankind for their benefit.”
“For instance, I haven’t even covered 404 errors. If someone’s using WordPress for their website, for instance, then they can use a simple plugin to redirect users to a customized 404 page using a permanent 301 redirect command. If, however, they’re creating their website from scratch, they need to use Google’s Webmaster tools to find their broken links and create a 301 redirect themselves. ”
“But, I digress. Allow me to continue now.”
Broken Links
Broken links are links that have no destination. So, when you visit a website and click on them, a “404 Not Found” error page is the result. Search engines don’t like broken links. They’re greedy like that, in the sense, that they are information hungry and if you give them nothing, they may penalize your website by preventing your pages from appearing in top SERPs.
The solution:
- Conduct regular hyperlink maintenance and remove broken links as quickly as possible.
- Create a custom 404 page that points visitors to related pages on your website. A good example of a 404 page is a sitemap of your website which contains useful links which will enable visitors to visit other areas of the website.
- Do this so that the search engines don’t index your customized 404 page. Have the return of a “404 Page Not Found” server status code rather than the “200 OK” server status code on the custom 404 page. This will prevent the search engine from indexing the customized 404 page and avoid any duplication issues with your actual sitemap.
Server Load Balancing
Server load balancing is about traffic distribution though this is not used as much today due to expanded server capabilities and bandwidth. This is essentially a technique that distributes Internet traffic equally among more than one server, so that no single server is overloaded. This is often done by a minor modification of the website’s URL. For example: http://www.marketingbones.com to http://www1.marketingbones.com, http://www2.marketingbones.com, http://www3.marketingbones.com.
Spiders view visible server load balancing as duplicate content and could penalize your website though these days spiders have evolved to the point where they can discern between server load balancing and actual duplicate content.
The solution:
Change to a server load balancing method that is invisible to user and search engine spiders. A good technique is using 301 redirects towards the primary domain on any duplicate domains.
URL Redirection
If you make URL changes on your website and don’t update the same in every place where it’s referenced internally (and from external sources too), the old URL will serve a “404 Not Found” error to the spider unless it is redirected to the new address.
The solution:
- Use on of the most commonly used redirects like HTML (meta refresh), javascript, 302 temporary, and 301 permanent.
- I strongly recommend the 301 redirect, as it informs the spiders that the old page no longer exists. The spider then visits the new page and indexes it accordingly.
<Noscript> Tags
Developers often use a <noscript> tag to add alternative content that displays in place of a scripted element for users on an unsupported browser. Potential problems with these tags include:
- This is the spammers code of choice as they use it to hide unrelated content or links.
- Incorrect indexing of the wrong webpage displaying the wrong title and description in the search result listings.
- Could stop the spiders from indexing all your content.
- Spiders don’t like it if these tags contain a redirect.
Typically, using the tags within your code does not automatically lead to penalization by the spiders unless the copy within the tags is completely different than the rest of the page. On the other hand, there’s very little benefit in tersm of SEO.
The solution:
- If you have any <noscript> tags, remove them quickly. Now.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is like ensuring that no pages on your website are lonely. So, you connect these pages to each other to create a sense of community. The spiders love that. Also, internal linking makes your webpages accessible to search engines and helps build the internal link popularity of key pages on your website. “I’ve noticed little to no internal links on y0ur website, Watson.”
The solutions:
- Use absolute links rather than relative links since absolute links contribute more link popularity. An absolute link looks like this :
<a href="http://www.domain.com/pagename.html"></a> A relative link looks like this : <a href="pagename.html"></a> I know that this is a very Web 1.0 suggestion but I’m on a roll! - Replace non-contextual links or weak links like “click here” or “see here” with keyword-phrase centric text links or anchor links. This gives the link credibility in the eyes of the search engine spider.
- Avoid javascript links as they cannot be read by spiders.
- Avoid image-mapped links and flash-based links as spiders may not be able to crawl through them.
JavaScript Links
If you have to have javascript links then be aware that most links in JavaScript are not crawled or indexed in search engines and the links are ignored. That being said as long as a link works without javascript enabled, the search engines can follow it. That’s where your sitemap comes in handy; As long as the sitemap has hard-coded (<a tag) links in it, the spiders will follow them. Google’s clearly states that every page should be reachable by at least one static text link so you do not need to make every link spider-friendly.
The solution :
- Using CSS instead of javascript for all necessary pop-ups.
- Build a site map. Don’t forget to have about 60-70 links and not more.
- Convert all javascript links to keyword phrase-centric HTML links.
Macromedia Flash
If you want to have Flash, then bear in mind that search engine spiders cannot fully extract, and therefore index, content from Flash files. From a usability standpoint, some visitors may not able to access flash-content hindering their entry to your website. Google and Adobe have taken steps to ensure that Flash content can be indexed
It’s possible to export Flash content to meta tags in order to make it visible to spiders that cannot actively crawl Flash content is possible, but this technique works poorly, if at all.
The solution:
- Best suggestion: Get rid of any Flash on the website. Period.
- Or switch to a HTML-based site with little or no Flash content.
- If this is not possible, then you can embed movies in the HTML pages to accompany your text-based content.
- Split the Flash file into separate files that live on individual HTML pages with text-based links.
- Or finally, build an HTML page with a 100% frameset and place the Flash file in it. Optimize the <noframes> tag with textual content and navigational links. This will allow the spiders to read the Flash content thus making it possible for them to crawl and index the content.
Site Maps
A sitemap is an internal index that helps your users identify content of interest within your website. Nowadays with the advent of drop-down menus, sitemaps are created more of indexing purposes than for usability though it is recommended to create one and place in the footer of your website.
The solution:
- Make sure that you create a sitemap with 60-70 links at the maximum. Use the same for your 404 error page but ensure taht it’s not indexed by the spiders.
- Create an xml sitemap using this sitemap tool and submit it to the search engines.
Dynamic URLs
A static page is alike a fixed mailing address – it’s so reliable. A dynamic page is like a P.O. Box – you don’t know when it will change. Static pages often outperform dynamic pages in search engine visibility because search engines prefer clean, static URLs. Many websites are hesitant to link to a dynamic page since the dynamic nature implies that the content may change, greatly impacting link popularity.
The solution:
- Rewrite all dynamic URLs as quickly as possible to make them static.
- Create a sitemap containing static URLs if you cannot implement a dynamic URL rewrite.
- Create and submit an xml sitemap to Google and Yahoo! Sitemaps if a dynamic URL rewrite is difficult to implement.
Session IDs
A session ID is a unique number that a website’s server assigns a specific user for the duration of that user’s visit. Using session IDs interferes with search engine spider crawling, as they cannot obtain a single unique URL for each page and may not properly index the site. Session ids are problematic as they can cause duplicate content issues with multiple versions of the URL getting indexed. They can also dilute your link popularity and in some cases trap the spider as the spider gets caught in an infinite loop.
The solution:
- Use session IDs only on certain pages and use a robots.txt file to disallow all sections of the website that use session IDs from being crawled.
- Implement user-agent detection to identify if the visitor is a spider. If a spider visits, the website will serve a URL without Session IDs.
“That completes my list of tips for you, Watson. Of course, these are just basic tips that you need to follow for good SEO implementation.”
“The biggest tip that I haven’t touched on yet is a Content Strategy for your website, the creation and implementation of which will determine the success of your SEO. Perhaps, another time after you’ve implemented the tips above. But, for now, how about we depart for the Supper Club for a spot of lunch?”
“Excellent idea, Holmes!”
A mere online presence won’t serve the purpose of reaching out and impressing your target audience, to beat the competition you need a well designed website with a good search rank and for that you need help of companies which provide complete solutions in website designing and development and search engine optimization.
Hey mate, nice post about Sherlock Holmes and SEO though it could’ve been written in a better manner. A pastiche tends to be successful when it’s more humorous than full of details which this post was. Cheers!
Chris, Thanks for the feedback! I will put on my funny hat the next time and try to keep things lighter. It does get challenging with stuff like redirects or robots file management.