Ten SEO Mistakes Made on Database Driven Websites
Jul 31, 2008 SEO
Search engine friendly websites is one of those often heard phrases, both from web site development companies and from their clients. Everyone knows that this is important to have, and yet it is one of the things that is actually often overlooked.
Search engine optimisation companies actually spend a lot of their time analysing a website and removing barriers to the search engines ranking a site highly. At the web development level, it is possible to build a site that is perfectly search engine friendly. One of the hardest types of sites to get right though are database driven websites. Listed below are ten of the most common issues that are created, often unknowingly, in the development process of a dynamically generated web site.
1. Pages with duplicate content – not enough differential areas within the pages, so that only small areas of the page change from page to page. It is essential that enough of the page text changes for the search engines to see an appreciable difference between one page and the next.
2. Pages with duplicate page titles – the page title is a great indicator to the search engines of the primary content of the page. Whilst this is often unique on sites such as e-commerce websites, it is often overlooked in other sites, particularly where small areas of the site are generated from a database, such as news pages.
3. Pages with duplicate meta descriptions – again, this is easy to overlook and set a global or category level meta description. These give the search engines a reason to penalise your site for not giving them enough information, and again, creating a unique meta description for every page is an essential SEO task.
4. Using auto-generation of pages as a shortcut instead of creating good content. This is linked quite closely to point 1, where it is possible to create pages that have only a tiny percentage difference between them. Databases are fantastic ways of storing information, but you still need to put the work in to fill them with content. Unique information about the subject of the page will immensely help both the long tail and the ability of the search engines to determine that a page is valuable.
5. Creating pages that are hidden behind form submissions or javascript postbacks that cannot be accessed by a search engine crawler. This is far more common that is generally realised. For instance .NET creates postback links by default instead of proper links – potentially making huge sections of a site unreachable. Likewise, it is easy to hide lovely content rich areas of your site behind a drop down selector in a form that means certain areas of the site are not visible.
6. Too many query strings – this is a common bugbear of the professional SEO, where complicated database selections create deep levels of pages, but with seven or eight &id= type strings. Additionally, some bad development methodology can leave pages with null query strings that appear in every URL but don’t do anything. The answer to this is generally URL rewrites, creating much more search engine friendly and user-friendly URLs!
7. Putting query strings in different orders when accessed through different places – this can create duplicate content issues, which can cause major penalties.
8. Not using user language to generate automated pages – if you are going to create a database driven website that uses words in the query strings (or better in rewritten URLs) make sure that you use words that will help you with SEO – if you sell widgets, make sure you are using the word widgets somewhere in the URL instead of just product= or id= – keyword research can assist with this.
9. Not allowing the meta data and title to be edited easily after the site build. It is possible to hardcode the generation of meta information into a database that doesn’t allow it to be edited later. Creating a mechanism for modifying this information initially helps everyone at a later stage when the information needs changing without shoehorning it into an already developed structure.
10. Creating keyword stuffed pages by using auto-generation. Once upon a time, search engines quite liked pages with high densities of your keywords, but now these are likely to get you marked down rather than up. So be aware when creating pages that long pages with lots of your products on can create too high a density. For instance listing blue widgets, light blue widgets, navy blue widgets, sky blue widgets is going to create a page with a very dense page for the phrase “blue widgets”.
These are just 10 of the most common potential optimisation pitfalls when creating dynamic websites. There are many more facets to producing a great database driven site, including user friendliness, speed, performance and security, but they all add together to make the best solution to your needs.
Tags: Add new tag, mistake
How Misspelled Words Affect Your SEO
Jul 26, 2008 SEO
You may say that SEO Visibitly is just plain wrong! I know the very idea would upset Mrs Garton, my old English teacher, but sometimes using misspellings could be the right thing to do.To explain why optimizing for a misspelling can help increase your website’s traffic we need to take a look at our own search habits. I type fairly quickly, but not very accuratley or should that be accurately, so mistakes, like that one, often occur.
When I’m using a Word processor or my blog account spellcheck takes care of those errors for me.With the search engines there’s no spellcheck, you get exactly what you typed. I guess the same is true for a lot of people searching for information. So, quite often, a phrase like SEO Visibility will be transformed into SEO Visibitly.Keyword Research I did some research using Wordtracker Competition Search Automation and KRA and the results are worthy of note. I found that the phrase SEO Visibility is searched for approximately 167 times per day across all the major search engines.
SEO Visibitly, the misspelled version, is searched for slightly less with around 142 searches, but when we look at the competition for the phrases there’s a considerable difference. Spelled correctly SEO Visibility has 600 competing pages, the misspelled version SEO Visibitly has only 7.
A search using googles ‘operator intitle: gives us a more accurate estimate of pages that have actually been optimized to for a particular phrase and so weeds out the ‘accidental hits’. The search for intitle:’ visibility’ returns 219 competing pages, not a massive level of competition, but take a look at intitle:’seo visibility’ and there are still only 7 pages to compete with. As long as you have SEO Visibitly in the title tag you can’ fail to be on the all important first page of the google search results. The only question is would you prefer to compete with 219 sites or 7 for about the same amount of traffic, I know what I’d prefer!
But what about the Mrs Garton factor? Or ‘can you be a trustworthy source of information if you don’t know how to spell?’ This question touches on the issue of trust, which is especially important for anyone trying to sell a product or service online. The perceived risk is higher if buyers have no personal contact with sellers. So this is a genuine problem that needs to be addressed whenever you use misspellings to bring in traffic.How you do that will depend on the structure and aims of your articles or the copy on your webpages. My own chosen method is to admit my mistake early and explain that I use misspellings to ensure that everyone can find my site. Instead of being a negative, misspellings are a kind of additional service. I don’t have any hard data, but I’m pretty sure a misspelling in the title tag drives off a few really pedantic searchers.
Conclusion In the end, Search Engine Optimization is all about generating targeted traffic. To that we need to be giving people what they’re looking for. By using misspelling we’re aiming to give people what they want and that’s got to be a good idea in any business.
Incoming search terms:
- intitle :seo blog
