Some Things to Avoid In Other To Achieve Better SEO Rankings

Avoid Frames

Frames are notorious for scaring search engine spiders and robots away.  The little machines can’t find the content of your page, and therefore they leave without indexing your content.  There are a couple of things you can do to fight that if you absolutely need to use frames.  You can use the <noframes> tag (ask your Webmaster about this) to put all the content you have on the actual pages in the frameset.  This is normally done so that people who have very old browsers can still see what’s on the page, but it is totally acceptable to the search engines.  The rules for creating <noframes> pages are the same as those for doorway pages.  Use the techniques described in that section to build frames pages that can be indexed by the search engines.

Java Scripts

These things can make a total mess out of your HTML code and make it virtually impossible for your site to be found.  Again, there’s a work-around for everything, but this one is not a very simple one and you must know what you are doing.  Ask your Webmaster if he knows how to do the following.  When using a script, you don’t actually have to embed it on the page.  You can put it on the server as a separate file (in your cgi-bin folder or someplace you can run scripts from), put a link to it on the page where it’s needed, and then invoke it from that page.  This way, it won’t clutter your page up with hundreds of lines of code, which is what you end up getting even for very simple scripts.

Flash and Other Fancy Design Elements

Again, I suggest we leave the fancy design for the big guys who can afford to invest millions of dollars in print and TV ads.  These things generally make the site slower to load, and they greatly impair your ability to compete on the search engines.  They look nice but, for me, what really looks nice is my wallet full of money.  I’m willing to sacrifice a little in the looks of my site for a little (or hopefully a lot) more cash in my pocket.  Aren’t you?