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Bad web design practices, that will hurt your site getting found in major search engines

Posted June 12th, 2010 by peter

Came across a check list in Search Engine Land that may help regular viewers of our blog.

We would like to reinforce to our clients and potential clients that we don’t use any of the worst practices talked of by the author Stephen Spencer. Maybe that is why our clients get found so well in Google, Yahoo and Bing.Naturally there are many things that we do (39 of them on our check list) which can help with seo, most of them include best practices, but there are a few we undertaken because we believe they can help, even though some would disagree. Client sites are certainly not penalised by them – and we can find no respectable seo commentator who have said they are  “bad”

here is a quick summary – you can read the full post here

• Do your site use pull-down boxes for navigation? – not seen much these days
• Does your sites primary navigation require Flash, Java or Javascript to function? – we still see a lot of this
• Is your web site done entirely in Flash or overly graphical with very little textural content? – can look smart, but wont work for seo
• Is your home page a “splash page” or otherwise content-less? – see above
• Does your site employ frames? – surprising how many sites are out there using them – they normally look past their use by date though
• Do the URLs of your pages include “cgi-bin” or numerous ampersands? – using search friendly urls  on your site will blow any competitors site away
• Do the URLs of your pages include session IDs or user IDs? – see above
• Do you unnecessarily spread your site across multiple domains? – duplicate content issues
• Are your title tags the same on all pages? – got webmaster tools for your site? easy to identify and fix

The list goes on – check them all with their explanations at the bottom on this post

So those “search engine experts” out there – we hope you are familiar and don’t do these things – you will only hurt your or your clients findability