Website Designing Techniques That Hamper Higher Rankings

Web designers may create websites using the best, latest and most sophisticated techniques available, but while putting their heart and soul in designing them, they forget one very important thing - SEO. Why is a website created? Not just to showcase your web designing talent, but the usability and visibility of the site to the users. And if the site is not seen by users,there is no question of it being used or visited. In fact, even the expertise and hard work of the web designer will also be appreciated only if the site is seen by people or spidered by the search engines. Hence, wisdom lies in designing a site keeping in mind the target audience and the search engines who will index it on the basis of its relevance and purposefulness. Using the the following designing techniques should be minimal or not at all, if you want your site to appear in top rankings:

Flash- Search engines don't read Flash files that are loaded from a stationary HTML page. That means no text embedded in this software is read. The way out is to either place hypertext links at the end of a few HTML pages linking to each other and to the homepage. This will aid the search engines to read the inside pages. Or you can put the flash file on each of these pages to avoid them being seen by physical visitors. This way flash file will be loaded and seen only when these pages rank and get clicked by visitors.

Frames- Again, frames obstruct the search engines to read website text. Frames lead to confusion for both the search engines and the visitors. If you can't avoid using them, then put meta tags in the frames programming and in no frames programming area.The most important thing is to have good amount of content in the no frames programming area along with invisible links to stationary HTML pages. This will make the search engines read, identify and index content from these pages. So, your site will appear as a no frames site even with frames.

ASP, Cold Fusion- Active Server Pages (ASP) and Cold Fusion Sites reduce the impact of a site on the search engines as they are dynamically created and the search engines find static HTML main page and static inside pages more attractive for ranking high. Cold Fusion jumbles up the whole site together, thus making it difficult for the search engines to change or index all such pages with .cfm extension.

More than just home page- Search engines are looking for good and relevant content in sites to attract visitors to them. So, if your site has just a homepage and no inside pages, chances are you may not get spidered and indexed by the search engines.

Too much Javascript- More the javascript for roll-over effects, longer the time taken to load that site. So, advisable is to put javascript in external .js files.

Confusing Directory Structures- Creating seperate folders for every inside web page with just a link can confuse and hamper the search engines to index your site as many spiders don't index very deep into the website. Make it as easy as possible for the search engines to find every page of your web site within seconds.

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