Search Engine Ranking is the basic concern of a web designer/developer and everyone who owns a website wants to be on the top of Search Engines. So the question is that how a website owner can improve its site ranking on major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Well certain website characteristics can harm or limit your potential search engine rankings. By avoiding these common SEO pitfalls, you can pave the way for higher search engine visibility.

Inadequate inbound links

One of the biggest problems with low-ranking websites is a lack of popular inbound links. Without a healthy number of high-quality links that point back to your site, you’ll be at a disadvantage against a competitor who has more. Other linking issues include links to flagged sites, overuse of parameters, improper redirects, lack of keywords, and generic link text.

Drowning in splash pages 

Splash pages are usually graphically rich pages designed to impress visitors or to direct them to alternative views of content, such as high- or low-bandwidth versions of a site. A “Skip Intro” link on a web page implicitly says that the page isn’t very important. The problem with splash pages—whether they include “Skip Intro”links or not—is that they are a wasted opportunity. Splash pages usually reside at the top of a site’s hierarchy.

Pages that are higher in your site hierarchy tend to get more links and more traffic than pages that are lower in your hierarchy check the below image. If visitors must click and if search engines must crawl farther to reach the real home page (i.e., what should be your top-level index page), you’ve put up a barrier to success.

Flash fires

Flash is installed on nearly every computer (98%) that accesses the Internet.8 This popularity has caused a conflagration of Flash gizmos on the Web. The problem with Flash is that search engines do not index it properly. We recommend using Flash to enhance the user experience, not to create it entirely. So, a Flash news ticker or embedded hotel reservation system is OK, but creating your entire site in Flash is not OK.

Following is a Flash SEO trick from Flash expert Gregory Cowley(http://gregorycowley.com/).

One technique you can use to make your Flash pages more SEO friendly is the two div trick. Use one div for the Flash movie, and the other with your HTML equivalent. Use JavaScript to hide the HTML DIV if the Flash plug-in is available, and the HTML is still available for search engines. This doesn’t work in complicated multi-page sites though. The key to a multi-page site, however, is to have all your text in an XML file outside of Flash.

This code requires a FlashObject class, available at http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/

<div id="flashcontent">

This is replaced by the Flash content if the user has the correct version of the Flash plug-in installed. Place your HTML content in here and Google will index it just as it would normal HTML content (because it is HTML content!) Use HTML, embed images, anything you would normally place on an HTML page is fine.
</div>

<script type="text/javascript">

// <![CDATA[

var fo = new FlashObject("flashmovie.swf", " flashmovie", "00", "300", "8", "#FF6600");

fo.write("flashcontent");

// ]]>

</script>

To avoid the appearance of cloaking, be sure to not change the textual content between the two divs.

Unprofessional design

A first impression of your website can take only milliseconds9 but will affect its long-term success. You wouldn’t go on a date poorly groomed and with dirty fingernails, right? Don’t make a similar mistake with your website. Having a professionally designed site is the most important factor for perceived web credibility. The higher the aesthetic quality of your site, the higher its perceived credibility will be. Consumers are more willing to buy from (and presumably webmasters are more willing to link to) firms with well-designed sites.

Web credibility, valuable content, and useful tools are key factors that compel webmasters to link to you, and visitors to stay and spend money.

Fix your focus. 

Some sites do not focus specifically enough. A store that sells everything, or that wants to be the next Amazon.com, has a long, painful road ahead. Such a broadly focused site is unlikely to succeed in natural SEO and probably needs to advertise with pay-per-click (PPC). It’s best to narrow your focus topically or geographically so that you have a better chance of ranking well and having higher conversion rates. There is one exception to this rule, however. If you can optimize every individual product page (e.g., HP LaserJet 6MP printer replacement toner cartridge C3903), it is possible to rank highly for those very specific terms.

Obscure navigation

The navigation on your site should comprise text that is easily indexed and that wasn’t created from graphical text, JavaScript, or Flash. Search engines can only index the text within your pages. They don’t read text that is embedded in graphics or Flash movies, nor do they execute JavaScript. A reasonable compromise for image-based navigation is to include alternative text for images.

Give up graphics-based navigation.

Macromedia Fireworks (now owned by Adobe) and Adobe ImageReady popularized the automatic slicing of graphics that made creating fancy navigation menus easy. Search engines don’t read graphical text, however. By embedding your keywords in graphics, you lose a golden opportunity to bake your SEO directly into the information architecture of your site.

Junk JavaScript-only navigation.

Avoid JavaScript-only navigation such as this:

<script src="/scripts/menunav.js" type="text/javascript">

Switch to list-based Cascading Style Sheet (CSS)-style menus or provide a text equivalent to your navigation elsewhere on the page for search engines to follow.

Duplicate content

Avoid exact or near duplicates of pages at different URIs. Although Google engineer Matt Cutts has said that there is no penalty for duplicate content, Google’s own webmaster guidelines say “don’t create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” Google generally tries to display the best version of a resource, but in rare cases it can penalize a site that appears to game the system with duplicate content The use of duplicate titles and meta tags across too many pages on the same site can harm rankings. Duplicate content will confuse the Googlebot as to which page is authoritative, thereby diluting your PageRank among the various URIs. You can use the robots exclusion protocol to exclude duplicate content (see http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html).

On the other hand, creating mini sites, each with valuable content on a different topic related to your business, is one way around the two-URIs-per-domain limit to Google SERPs. Some companies buy domain names for each product or service, create and promote separate websites, and attain multiple top 10 spots on the first SERP. We don’t recommend using this technique of creating multiple sites to crowd all of your competitors off the first SERP.