ecommerce blog

10 ways to kill a website

Written by: Carl | March 17th, 2010

Anyone that owns a website should already know about search engine optimisation and if you don't then you need to find out about it straight away as it is a vital part of any successful ecommerce solution as the development on the site or the design of the website could make or break the success of the website.

There is much more to SEO than meets the eye and it is not only for search marketers it is also something that web developers, designers and ecommerce companies need to know about and make sure that they keep in mind when designing and building your website. The more common reasons for failing on the web are poor design, bad and unfriendly web structure and bad coding of the website amongst many others, however below are 10 ways to you need to avoid to stop killing your website.

1. URL Structure

Poor URL structure is a common thing and should be looked at more often, especially if you do not know too much about SEO, you need to make sure that pages are named correctly while being developed. Friendly URL's are good from both a user perspective as well as from a search engine one.

2. Flash overuse

The use of flash brings a great eye catching visual effect to a website however it does mean that the website become partially invisible to search engine spiders as they are not able to read flash as they are text based.

3. Landing / Splash Page

Many websites now have a landing or splash page which is normally full with flash or images that are used as an information page about the company with a link to enter the site which takes the user to the home page. The difference here is that if the link to the home page is text based then it will allow the spiders crawling the website to go to the home page however if this is embedded in the flash then it is more than likely that they will not be directed to the home page thus will not crawl your website.

4. Ajax on the website

The use of ajax is used a lot on website now and looks really cool, however this is not always a good thing for search engine optimisation and this is due to text not always being indexed properly thus the text cannot be added to the search engine results. Just remember to use ajax on your website in moderation.

5. Graphics and HTML balance

Having a balance between graphics and HTML on a site is more important than you think as extreme use of one or the other can harm your website. For instance if you too much text then you run the risk of your website looking bland and not pleasing on the eye, however on the other hand the use of too much images of graphics is not beneficial for SEO so your website needs to have this balance.

6. Alt attributes

As you should know by now search engine spiders are not able to search images so the use of alt text on your images are vital to all the spiders to know what the images are so make sure that they are not blank.

7. Anchor Text

It is perfectly good to have actionable anchor text such as 'click here' to inform the user what to do and anchor text also has value for search engine optimisation but be careful not to overuse this.

8. Title Tags

Misuse of titles tags will harm your website, each page on the website needs to have unique title tags otherwise they will all look the same to the search engines when crawling them. Make the title tags meaningful and limit them to about 65 characters.

9. Session ID's

Session ID's are created on ecommerce solutions so that they can track the actions that users take but session ID's are linked to each URL at the users visits which create duplicate pages and content which is not good for SEO however these can be changed by using parameters to overcome this.

10. SEO as an afterthought

The biggest mistake that will help kill your website is the oversight of using search engine optimisation which is a huge part of becoming an online success and keeping SEO in mind throughout the process of building your website is crucial if you are to have any further online success.