Three big mistakes to avoid on search engines
A book could be written (and indeed many have) on the mistakes made trying to rank well in search engines and how to avoid them. Short of writing a book, we have listed three of the common mistakes we often see other people making.
Hosting on cheap foreign servers and not being shown on local
search results
Yes it is true that hosting abroad can be cheaper than hosting in the UK. Because of this many people have decided to host with cheaper providers abroad in countries like the USA, Germany and Eastern Europe. Sounds great, but Google will know which country your website is hosted in!
So if your website is hosted in Germany, Google will assume it is a German website. When people on Google check the box "pages from the UK" your website will not be shown because Google thinks it is German.
There are ways around this, but generally speaking it is less hassle just to host in the UK. Paying a web developer to implement work arounds will cost more than the extra couple of pounds per month to host in the UK.
Stale content which never changes
Google and other search engines hate this! Website content that has not changed in a while will definately not be looked on favourably by search engines. Search engines are like children that thrive on being fed new relevant information. Your website needs to provide this in order to consistently do well.
This is where Content Management Systems come into their own. Updates can be done quickly without any special web skills. Really updates once per week are preferable to a website, once a month as a bare minimum.
Using meaningless page names
We have all seen a web page with an address of www.somecompany.co.uk/page1.htm. This not only looks a little unprofessional from a human perspective but it does not help search engines either. Search engines will actively look at the page names to see if it can determine anything about the page from the name.
A much better page name (if you were selling business cards for example) would be www.somecompany.co.uk/businesscards.htm You are helping a search engine by providing hints as to what the page content is about. Search engines place a high value on page names.
Using a Content Management System, changing page names should be easy to do as any decent system will automatically update all of the links within the website with the new page name. Be careful when re-naming pages though, search engines will also not be pleased if they go to page1.htm and it is no longer there. Submitting a sitemap to a search engine or asking your web developer about 301 redirects that tell search engines that a page has moved, are definately good ideas.
There are many more do's and dont's that could be covered, but these are three that can easily be avoided in order to benefit your search engine optimisation efforts. As we come across more common mistakes (and positive things to do too) we will be sure to post them here.
