October 29, 2004

Most people have heard of the hall of fame, but to many, the "Hall of Shame" (!) may not be as well known. My goal in this article is to help ensure that you never have an opportunity to be in it, not even from a distance!

This article is another way of saying: “The 10 steps to avoid at all times”, in preventing a site penalty or ban from the search engines.

Step 1: Build your entire site using graphics
One of the best ways to secure a front-row seat in the hall of shame would be to put all your links in Java script or use images or graphics for your links. Today’s search engines cannot ‘see’ or index sites that use such linking strategies. Make certain all your links are text links, using the standard H REF HTML reference.

Also, if you need to link to a page in your site that talks about "blue widgets", you should write "blue widgets", both as the name of that file and also the name of the link.

The more keywords you place in text links, the better. And while you’re at it, it’s always a great idea to include a sitemap of your site. A well-designed sitemap will ensure that all the pages in your site will be fully indexed.

Step 2: Design your site using Flash technology
Even today, I still encounter some websites that were designed using "certain fancy graphic" technology. Most search engines today cannot index or “read” a site that was created using these technologies, since there is no text to crawl. Search engines only seek out one thing and that is content, and then only in the form of text. You can use a bit of graphics, for example in a animated banner or header, but make absolutely certain that there is lots of HTML text to crawl on that page and throughout your site.

A bad idea: Invisible text >>>

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Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2004

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