10 SEO Mistakes That Prevent Crawlers From Finding Your Content

Yes, back to SEO. This is the most essential feature of any website after user-friendly design and high-speed optimized coding. What is the point of making a mind-blowing delicious apple cake with whipped cream and strawberry on top if no one would be able to taste? I see no sense in there so let’s make sure we will bake our cake following the recipe of success SEO.

Let’s see what 10 common mistakes are usually made by bloggers and see how we can avoid to trigger their backflash. In fact in this particular case it’s better to learn from other people mistakes than do them yourself. I hope you will never find yourself swamped at low-ranked bog and these tips will help you drive more traffic to your site.

SEO Mistake #1: You ingnore Sitemap

Sitemap is kind of roadmap of your blog, it connects pages into one complicated labyrinthine that seacrh crawlers follow. They know where to go next after indexing another page. This way all of your pages are indexed and no one is missed. Of course if you don’t have broken links, crawlers don’t like them but we will talk about it a bit later.

How to create a Sitemap? If you are using wordpress as your CMS, there is a Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress plugin that perfectly suits our needs. Plugin automatically generates a compliant xml-based sitemap of  WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. All you need to do is to download the plugin and install it to /wp-content/plugins/ directory on your web server, find it under Plugins in your WordPress admin panel and activate it.

Tip: You can find more on sitemaps at http://www.sitemaps.org/

SEO Mistake #2: A lot of JavaScript code is used

More javascript you are using on your pages – more time is needed to load the page.  If the content all covered with javascript functions it makes harder for crawlers to recognize where the actual content is. And sometimes thy are ot really successful in finding the content in that mess so be careful and use only the moct nesessary functions and don’t forget to remove unused stuff.

Tip: Link external javascript files in the head of the page rather than shove the bunch of js code into HTML.

SEO Mistake #3: You have Flash content on your pages

Yes, flash looks rather good and magnificent but it is not seo friendly at all. Quite the contrary seo optimizers recommend avoiding flash content on your site because it is not indexed by crawlers.

Tip: You can replace a lot of flash content like slideshow, sliders, etc. with javascript and see #2 Tip on how to better do that. Some links on the topic:

http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle/

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/stepcarousel.htm

SEO Mistake #4: You accidentally broke robots.txt

It happens to the best of us. And if you are not an expert in this area you might wonder what all those “*” and “!” means. Be careful with this file. It can both help you to be indexed better by crawlers or you can be completely avoided by them. Make sure you don’t have these lines in you robots.txt!

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Tip: Learn more about robots.txt at http://www.robotstxt.org/

SEO Mistake #5: Frames are close friends of your pages

Frames should be avaoided as much as possible as you really don’t need to use them. Frames are actually outdate technique.  There are a lot of plugins, solutions and libraries written by cool developers to help you in your site construction. Also you can always use div tags and css to instead of frames and they are perfectly seo friendly.

So please make sure you don’t use frames on your site.

Most major search engines simply don’t support frames and if you include frames in your web pages you simply be ignored by crawler which is really pitty.

Using frames can prevent them from finding pages within a Web site or cause them to send visitors into a site without the proper frame “context” being established. Danny Sullivan

SEO Mistake #6: Broken links

Ah, this will never happen to me… This is what we usually thunk when we reach this point. Don’t be so sure, becuase there are a lot of things that happens in their own way: someone’s domain name has expired, some services were moved, images were removed from the servers. It comes really annoying to click on the link that leads to nowhere. Don’t allow your resource to become “out-of-date-links-known”. Check resources you are linking to from time to time and ask your friends to notify you if they moved/renamed their content you are linking to.

Crawlers are like human visitors here – they don’t like resources that links to broken or not existing web pages. So again – try and keep all you links orginized and of course don’t link to forbidden/spam content – this will not add you good standing.

SEO Mistake #7: Pages and posts have dynamic and complex URLs

This is very simple and useful tip. Urls like : http://yourdomain.com/title-with-keywords/ are much more appreciated by crawlers than http://yourdomain.com/111.html. You need to make your links url friendly with relevant keywords in your title.

Tip: If you are using WordPress there is a must-do setting for short seo friendly urls under Settings->Permalinks.

SEO Mistake #8: You are missing meta description tags

How do crawlers know that your content is worth to be shown in search results? You should tell them about it! Meta description tag is what you are looking for. It should be one or two catchy sentences that involve as much relevant keywords as possible. For example:

<meta name="description" content="My name is Julia. This is my online blog. We are here discussing all that covers freelance, working, making money online and being a freedom-loved person. Grab a coffee and relax" />

SEO Mistake #9: Navigation and inner pages are not enough linked throughout the site

You content must be linked throughout the site but not too much or your might be blocked. Some black seo techniques use this overlinking to itself for speedy promotion but crawlers become clever each day and are able to recognize the trickery. So don’t make yourself become of of the black listed guys.

SEO Mistake #10: You don’t use fresh relevant keywords for your content

And last but not least is the following – keywords. I want to repeat myself that keywords are the most useful tools for your promotion. You need to use them everywhere on the site:

• SIte Title
• Site Tagline
• Page Meta Description
• Page Keywords List
• Post Title
• Post Content
• Image Alt Text
• Image Caption (if applicable)
• Links Titles
• etc.

Don’t create content that consists of only keywords – you will be blocked. Make sure your relevant keywords appear throughout the content. Use online tools like http://www.alexa.com/ or http://www.google.com/analytics/ to know what keywords are the most applicable for you site and how did users come to your site. What search keywords did they use to get to you?

Analyze, make desicions and strategy depends on your goals.

Conclusion

There are a lot of SEO techniques to help you rank better. Start from getting rid of 10 SEO Mistakes That Prevent Crawlers From Finding Your Content. Make good SEO.

More useful tips for search engine optimization are coming. Stay tuned!

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