By Elmer on February 18, 2009

There are many purposes why websites are built. Some are made to promote a company’s brand. Others are created to sell products or built to provide information. However, no matter what the purpose of these websites are, they have a common requirement to make these objectives possible: human visitors.

In the past, the significance of the World Wide Web was minimal. So it was enough to put up a website, leave it online and that’s it. But the Web grew tremendously, not only in number of websites, but also in number of users, thanks to expansion of Internet usage and its accessibility to other devices like mobile phones.

The popularity of search engines as a means to find information has prompted websites to try to outdo each other in search result rankings. Some webmasters figured out how to rank well (in today’s lingo, we call it search engine optimization), while others haven’t. Unfortunately, there are still many websites that belong to the latter. Let’s try to identify what are some of the characteristics of these websites that hinder them from gaining visibility on search engines.

Not Enough Text Content
Search engines look for text content to identify what type of website is it all about. With not enough text content, search engines have little or no reason why a website should rank for a keyword that is hardly ever used. Apart from exceptional cases where websites are so popular that they don’t need good amount of content because they get plenty of links. Think of sites like Nike or Coca Cola that even if they have Flash websites, they still rank well for certain keywords. Most sites aren’t as popular as these two so development of content is crucial. After all, content is what makes a website important and those that are valuable to visitors will likely get links, passed around or bookmarked.

Improper Use of Framesets
Although its use has been on a decline as far as I can observe, there are still sites that make use of frames on websites, with bad results. Framesets are not necessarily bad, but in most cases, they pose as obstacles to search engine robots. These robots are responsible for extracting content and they navigate from one page to another through links. If a robot reaches a page that is part of a frameset and doesn’t contain a link to any other page, its navigation within the website is ceases to continue. If a page hasn’t been crawled, there is no way it will show up on search engine results because search engines haven’t recognized them in the first place.

Preference of Images Over Text
Some websites prefer to use titles in graphics even if they are in text. Common examples are menu items and header text. They are done for good reason: they are visually appealing to human visitors. However, search engines can’t read text within a graphic image. Although there is always a workaround on this issue — to provide alternate text — some webmasters are lazy enough to implement it. As a result, search engine see less content than human visitors do.

No Custom Title and Meta Tags
Websites are typically composed of multiple pages, ranging from less than ten to a few million. Obviously, one page is different from another, in terms of content, layout or both. For this reason, each page should have its own page title and tags that describe its content. But many websites fail to do so. It is important to implement this one because search engines use these elements to represent a page on search results. The more descriptive our page title and descriptions are, the more likely they’ll attract visitors into clicking them.

Poorly Defined URL Structure
There are websites that append session IDs on URLs. Session IDs are useful to keep people logged in or provide them with secure transactions in case they are making purchases online. But in some ways they block search engine robots capability to navigate through the website by virtue of getting through a “different” URL even if the content is the same. This may be caused by poorly structured content management system. The same applies to URLs that have multiple parameters such as “&id=12389&pid=AJGWWI&cid=755428″. There is a possibility that search engine robots get lost along the way and will miss crawling otherwise important pages.

Improper Linking Method
When I mentioned linking earlier, it refers to <a href=”"> and not JavaScript or other forms. Why? It’s because search engines are kind of outdated, and can’t easily recognize JavaScript or other form as links. As a result they will just skip these hyperlinks and the pages linked to them in the process. Therefore using the right type of linking method should address this search engine limitation.

Have a look at your website and examine using these characteristics whether it is search engine friendly or not.

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