Top 5 UNUSUAL Search Engine Optimisation mistakes

 I assume we all know about usual SEO mistakes – lack of original content,  not having sitemap and robots.txt,  wrong alt image text attributes,  accidentally keyword stuffing, etc. But there are many mistakes which are less known and not considered by many of website owners, even SEO companies.

  



Putting Important Text As An Image

There are so many beautifully designed websites on the Internet. But, there is something strange with them. How many times it happens to you, when you want to copy part of text from some page, and put your cursor over it, you can’t select it? That is because some ‘smart’ web designer rendered whole page into gif or jpg image!!! Maybe website looks awesome, but search engine robot will not find any searchable text on page. Therefore , rankings will be catastrophic! Don’t do that, at least don’t let the designer to render whole page into image. Avoid changing your most important headlines into images.
 
Flash websites and JavaScript 

Similar thing. It might be attractive for users, but not to search engines. If you really want that your site is Flash based, you should provide an HTML version as well  for search engine. Google spider can’t read flash, therefore can’t index it. If you want to find out more about flash tips, read this article about optimizing flash sites.  


JavaScript: Search engines do not read it. In case you have JavaScript menu, then you should necessarily  build a sitemap. Also, consider to put the links in a “noscript” tag  because of “Crawling”.




 Same Title And Meta Description On Every Page Of The Website

Let users and  search engines know about every page on your website. Each page is unique. Each page has its own special function.  So, change the title and meta descriptions  to match the content on that particular page. It is possible to optimize each page  of website for couple of a important search phrases. You can take huge  advantage with this method  and rank well for several search terms  at the same time, targeting few longtail phrases for each page.

Neglecting the Old URLs while redesigning your website

People used to find  pages o your website based on the information that search engine robots compiled. You will trow away all the traffic you built up before, if you get rid of old URLs. Robots  will send people to pages that no longer exist. You should avoid it.
If you have to make redesign, just stick to the same structure that your old site has. Keep the same url addresses for the new page. In case you don’t want to keep old structure of your website, then use so called  "permanent redirects": Make a .htaccess file which  will tell search engines to permanently redirect traffic from an old url to a new url. Doing that, you will send a "signal" for search engines, which will soon change their listings from the old urls to the new urls.
 
Dynamic URL’s without keywords in it.

Many  people have  CMS such as Joomla or Drupal. CMS use dynamic urls with all kinds of random letters  and random numbers in the url. The words in your URL are very important signals to search engines what that page is about. Wordpress, for example,  allows you to control your urls. Search engines read words like humans so your URLs should be readable to both humans and spiders.
 
"Splash Page"

Splash pages can have amazing design, but they are disaster when it comes to SEO, because  spiders are looking for text, but there is no text on a "splash page." Home page of website is the most important page. That page has the best chance of being optimized.Don’t  use it to place some nice picture. I am sure you know that search engines don't like splash pages very much.Also, huge majority of people are annoyed by clicking and clicking to finally view the content. Splash pages – one of the things you must avoid, except if you are making them just on affiliate purpose.