Fatal SEO Mistake - Putting Appearances Before SEO

Are you putting appearances before SEO?

Unfortunately, many small business owners find themselves in a situation where they’ve spent thousands of dollars on a beautiful site their ideal customers can't find. Why can’t people find their site? Their potential visitors can’t find the site because the search engines can't index most of the content.

What does this mean? Search engines use programs called robots or spiders to “crawl” the Internet and gather information. These automated programs follow links from one web page or website to another. When they find new content or a new website, they index, or save, what they find.

When a potential visitor goes to a search engine like Google and types what they’re looking for into the search query box (keywords), the information in the search engine’s index that is considered most relevant to the search, is displayed on the search engine results page (SERP). The visitor then clicks on the result that they think will best answer their query. 

I received an email yesterday from someone who had tried to optimize their site for the search engines:

"I still find that my website is not displaying anywhere near the first few pages. I have also tried to check the source info on my website and it won't show up. Please help!"

When I checked out her site I discovered that she had built her site using frames and that whilst it looked beautiful, no one was ever going to find it listed in search results.

You can make sure your site is easy to index and list in search results by following these 5 guidelines:

1. Make SEO your first priority. Find a reputable SEO professional who can advise you on what your website needs to be search engine friendly.
2. Stay involved in the website building process and make sure you know exactly what methods they are using to build your site.
3. Make sure your website isn’t built in Flash or Ajax and that your content isn’t hidden in a graphic. Spiders can’t read and index content that is hidden in Flash, Ajax or a graphic. And, these websites can be slow to load and hard for your visitors to use.
4. Avoid frames. Frames will affect your ranking. This is because many search engines don'tt index the content in frames. Also, not every browser can read frames, so you could be hiding your content from the people you want to see it.
5. Avoid having an intro. Don’t force your visitor to watch or read something before they can access your content. This is annoying, and unless you have something unique that they really want to access they will simply click away.

You will save yourself a lot of heartache by not making the mistake of putting appearances before SEO.