Common Web Page Problems that can hinder SEO

There are some common web page problems that may affect your SEO rankings. As we know HTML, Javascript and CSS makes most part of the web page. If these building blocks of a web page are not handled and implemented properly, they can cause serious rendering problems and delays in the page served to the client. Ultimately it may have an effect on your SEO rankings because slow response is one of the factors that can make your site come lower in SERP (search engine result positioning). Crawlers also love clean and fast response pages. So read the guidelines carefully to avoid such common problems with web pages.

First of all, the size and complexity of the markup determine the initial display speed of a web page. Pages with nested tables and miss positioned CSS and Javascript can cause reasonable delay in serving the page to the client. Therefore the informative content that the user is looking for may be delayed for several seconds. It is normally observed that most users don’t wait for the page that takes more than 10 seconds to load and close it. So you need to make sure this is not happening with your website. You can also check this, if you have configured a Google webmasters account with your site. Below screen shot shows the average response time of my Blog in milliseconds.

As you can clearly see, the average response time is 237ms which is really fast. You should be worried, if it crosses 1000ms mark on average.

Make it your practice to always put CSS at the top of page and the Javascript at the very bottom. It is also better to use external CSS and Javascript but if you cannot use it in this way due to any technical issue like if you have hundreds of web pages that would need to be changed afterwards. Then at least, make sure that you replace all your javascript at the bottom and place CSS at the top of each web page.

According to Steve Souders in his book “High Performance Web Sites”, 80% of web page response time is in the content. Most of this time is spent dealing with the objects that make up a web page. As the number of objects per page increases beyond four, object overhead dominates total web page delay.

It is noticed that majority of the web pages exceeded well past this threshold, with more than 350 Kb in file size and many objects [almost above 20] in the webpage. If you can take these numbers to some descent level in your website, your page response time will definitely increase producing positive results for your SEO and user satisfaction.

What is Google Sandbox and Penalty Box

For a new website with a new domain, it can take months for Google to rank the site. Conventionally speaking, this has meant that a brand new website could not seem to rank high for much beyond its own domain name. After a few months, Google decides that it can “rust this newly created website and can let it rank. This indexing delay for new websites is called the Google Sandbox.
 
Google can also penalize websites that try to game their system. Many websites try this and practice un-ethical approaches to rank high in the search engine result positions. The intention behind may be lack of awareness, or someone just trying to rank #1 in matter of few days without following guidelines. But once identified, Google penalize the website and places it in its sandbox, where the site can stay for the rest of life, until following proper guidelines from Google. We normally call this the Penalty Box, which can be checked in the gray PageRank bar in Google toolbar for firefox and IE. To get out quickly from sandbox, you need to remove the worst things that get you banned and then follow the Google’s guidelines for webmasters. After you have cleared your website with Webmaster Central, you can request for inclusion again.

If you have a Blog or any forum where you accept comments from your visitors, specify the nofollow attribute for avoiding comment spam. This method is rather very important for your site to avoid going into Google sandbox. Because anyone can easily include a website link in comments which could already be in Google’s sandbox due to violation of webmaster guidelines for that website. Eventually your site may also go into sandbox as a link from your site would be pointing to a spam site. So be careful in this regard.

For more information on the nofollow attribute, visit this page at
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/

Common SEO Mistakes to be avoided while optimizing website

Certain website parameters can damage or limit your potential search engine rankings. By avoiding these general SEO pitfalls, you can smooth the way for higher search engine visibility. Below, I will show you some common mistakes that most of the beginner SEO guys commit while performing optimization.

Insufficient inbound links

One of the major problems with low level ranking websites is a lack of inbound links which are popular. Without a reasonable number of high quality links, you will be at a disadvantage against a competitor who has more links than you. Other linking problem include links to flagged sites, inappropriate redirects, lack of relevant keywords, and generic link text.

Splash pages

Splash pages are graphically rich pages intended to astonish visitors or to direct
them to alternative views of content, such as a very high, medium or low bandwidth versions of a site. A “Skip Intro” link on a web page itself says that the web page that visitor is going to see is not very important. The issue with splash pages, whether they include “Skip Intro” links or not is that they are an opportunity which is wasted. Splash pages typically reside at the very top of a site’s hierarchy. Web pages that are higher in your site hierarchy are likely to get more links and hence more traffic than web pages that are lower in hierarchy. If visitors of a site must have to click and if search engines must have to parse and crawl farther to reach the actual home page (i.e. what should be your high level main or index page), you have definitely put up a obstacle to success.

Flash player and Flash Content

Flash player needs to be installed computer that is accessing the website content which includes Flash. Flash came with different versions. Older versions may not support flash content created in newer versions. Another problem with Flash is that search engines cannot properly index the content present in flash file. I recommend using Flash to improve the user browsing experience, not to create it totally in flash. One method you can use to make your Flash web pages more SEO friendly is the 2 div approach. Using one div for the Flash movie, and other div with its HTML equivalent. If any flash plug-in is available and it is compatible then show div containing flash and hide the other div, else vice verse.

Unprofessional design

It’s a very true saying that “A first impression is the last impression”. Your website can take only few seconds to make an impression to the new visitor and it will also affect your long term success in terms of visitor loyalty. Having a well designed website is the most critical factor for apparent web credibility. The more your site is aesthetically strong, the higher its credibility will be. Customers are also more willing to buy from websites that are well designed. Web credibility, valuable content, and useful tools are key factors that compel webmasters to link to you, and visitors to stay and spend money.

Poor navigation

The navigation on your website should include text that is easily indexed and that was not created from JavaScript, or any Flash object. Search engines can only read and index the content within your pages. They cannot read text that is embedded in images or Flash movies, nor do they run JavaScript snippets. Though modern search engine practices may include to read text present in images but it has yet not achieved so far, therefore you need to stick to equivalent text. It may be in the form of Alt tags. By embedding your main keywords in images or graphics, you lose a golden opportunity to swelter your SEO directly into the information design of your site.

Duplicate content

Avoid duplicates of pages at different locations in your website. Although Google representative Matt Cutts mentioned that there is no penalty for duplicate content, but Google’s own guidelines say “don’t create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” Google usually tries to show the best version of a resource, but in rare cases it can penalize a website that shows to game the system with duplicate content. The use of duplicate titles across too many web pages on the same website can damage rankings and PR. Duplicate content may confuse the crawlers of different search engines as to which page is authoritative, thereby diluting your Page Rank among the various URLs. You can use the protocol to exclude duplicate content. (See here for more details http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html).