May 10th, 2010 by Nick

When setting up a website and thinking about optimising it for SEO, it can be useful to consider all those aspects which tend to lead to lower search rankings and make sure they are avoided. Then, the hard work put into making a site succeed will not be diminished by negative factors that may have been overlooked.

Content is hugely important for a website’s success, both in terms of visitor satisfaction generally and search engine optimisation. Having dull content, with nothing really to say and stuffed full of keywords, will discourage visitors from returning to a site. The overuse of keywords will also be picked up by search robots with negative effects, and the website’s search ranking will fall.

Having very little content is also problematic. Visitors will not find much to interest them on such web pages, and search engines will mark them down as being sparse and therefore of poor quality. The solution for a site that lacks content is not to copy from other places online, as duplication is particularly frowned upon by search engines. Unique content is called for in order to perform well in search rankings, and if a number of identical pages are discovered by search crawlers they will discard all but one, with no guarantee that that one will belong to one’s own website. If there are numerous cloned pages within the same site, crawlers waste time investigating them all and can miss other, perhaps more important, content altogether.

It is particularly crucial to avoid any duplication of titles, as, out of the whole page, a title holds the most weight for SEO. Lazily copying the same text for the titles of a series of pages is likely to lead to being poorly rated by search engines, and the same goes for the words used in Meta descriptions.

Linking to poor quality sites is very detrimental to search engine optimization, especially if such links are numerous. This provides a reason for regularly updating one’s links, as businesses can fail and websites may be taken over by dubious companies one would never wish to link to normally. The practise of buying and selling links in order to improve one’s position in search rankings is risky because it goes against Google’s guidelines, and there is the possibility of your website being banned.

Something which can have a great affect on a website’s perceived quality is its hosting. Choosing a reliable hosting company is vital in order to make sure web pages are available at all times, for visitors and search robots. If servers are continually down, resulting in a site disappearing from the web for long periods of time, then search crawlers will not be able to index all the pages easily, and the website may be marked as being of poor quality, quite properly as it is unable to provide a constant service to visitors.

At SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk, we not only optimise your website for search engines but also correct any negative factors for you.

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