Website 101 - The Top Five Most Avoidable SEO Boo Boo's

As a web designer creating a website for your customer your responsibility extends quite a bit further than just creating pretty web pages. Below are 5 easy to avoid pitfalls that are often overlooked at the end of the design process in the rush to get the site ready for launch.

1) Home as Your Page Title
This is the most heinous crime that a web designer can commit. If any pages on your sites ever say Home in the Title Bar - save your clients some money and find something else to occupy your time. 

A reminder: The Title tag is the topmost part of your site in the web browser and is usually blue in color.

The text in here is the most important single statement a site can make as far as a Search Engine is concerned. So if your site says home; that is where you should go! There are thousands of pages of sage advice about how long a title should be and how you should ponder for hours over what keywords to pack it with ... all of which is important advice - once you are past the Home word.

2) Missing Image Alt Attributes
This is very important real estate as far as search engines are concerned and there is no excuse for leaving any of your images with blank Alt text. Search engines cannot read images and thus rely on the text that you as a designer type in.

Although the original function of Alt (Alternate) Text was to act as a fallback for when images failed to load, search engines gobble up Alt Text because this tells them what the picture is saying. So stuff your Alt Text with keywords to assist the search engines with finding out what your pages are about.

A note about context: search engines can be quite smart in discerning that your Alt Text agrees with the other text content on your pages. So having a page Title that promises banking content with pictures of swimsuit models will probably get red flagged for inappropriate context between pictures and page text.

3) Make Text on a Webpage Read Badly for "SEO Purposes"
Always follow one basic rule of thumb and your sites will prosper. The No 1 Rule in web design states: "If it is user friendly it is search engine friendly".

Never write rubbish sentences that aim to stuff keywords into a paragraph as a means of increasing the overall SEO value of the text. Sure the search engines can't read and understand your text, so you sure can fool them. But what possible value can you gain by attracting a prospect to one of your pages only for the prospect to hurry off because the text sounded like it was produced by the famous team of typing monkies.

4) Duplicate Content
Never ever have duplicate text in your page titles. Also make sure that you never duplicate the content of a page just to create more content. Search engines are very good at sniffing out duplicate content because sites with more content have a positive ranking advantage and the engines will be careful not to count duplicated pages.

If a search engine detects duplicate content within your site it may possibly devalue the overall value of your site.

5) Link to External Pages From Your Home Page
In general, links to any external sites are bad for your Page Rank because an external link bleeds page rank like a bullet hole. This is especially bad for your home page. Thus never have external links on your home page, link to sites that you need to link to in deeper more obscure pages on your site.

Of course there are many other SEO errors that can be made, but these five are among the most easily avoidable. Miss them your site will broadcast a message that says clueless / newbie SEO person made this!

Dr Howard Rybko has been involved with software since 1984. After more than 15 years in medical software and IT Systems, he established Syncrony Internet Services in 1999. Syncrony is focused on website design and web development using the DotNetNuke Content Management System (DNN)