Deadly sins of SEO Sites, and any other site for that matter

While reading through my daily news sources I found this Blog post which I thought makes for very interesting reading. It’s meant for SEO companies, but any website owner should stop to think about whether your site commits any SEO sins…

This article comes from a blog post by “The Venture Skills Blog” - see http://ventureskills.wordpress.com/2007/03/13/deadly-sins-of-seo-sites

The Venture Skills Team comments about the fact that every man and his dog are now experts in the field of SEO and you should look at their sites and check for the deadly sins to see if they really know what they are talking about. They mention that even “some of the biggest SEO companies fail these really simple steps for well optimised pages.”

So, let’s find out what what some of the deadly sins are…

No Alt attribute in image tags, this is a double sin from an SEO point of view your missing out on valuable method of adding more keywords without penalty but your also failing to meet W3C guide lines on accessibility and therefore fail the most important rule in SEO Design a site for a Human and a search engine will follow
Tables, tables are for tabular data not content! While tables may be easier to use then CSS they are not helping your search engine rankings, as they make it difficult for the engine to determine what is content, and what is tabular data content. As the engines become more aware of semantic structure of a page, table based designs will suffer even greater penalties.
Headings, What’s wrong with using H1/2/3 tags? their seems to be a bizarre trend away from these useful tags the reason for this trend is unclear but the need for these tags is once again to provide semantic information to the search engines. The heading tags provide both hierarchical structure as well as a means to create keyword rich titles.
Images instead of text, sites with whole paragraphs embedded within images making it completely inaccessible both to humans and search engines. using any binary data to display text is a sin including flash
Doctype / Language, two issues here one not declaring a doc type on a page, this might be considered a minor sin, but you must rememmber unless you declare a doc type search engines will work on best guesses as to what that type might be, not so much of an issue today but it could be in the future. Declaring a language however is an issue, particularly if the language on the page is not English, international search engines determine a pages language via a meta tag which includes a two letter acronym. So if the site is in French the acronym is FR while en-GB is English without a language your site will be either listed as unknown or dumped in the American English categories.
robots.txt & htaccess two simple files to control how and where people see your site, one for humans the other bots, but why are people not using them or worse I have actually come across sites that have robots.txt files with disallow all, blocking bots from crawling.

The Venture Skills Team suggests that if you are an SEO company, make sure your site doesn’t commit one of the deadly sins. If it does, then fix it.

If you are an SEO company and do not apply these principle into your client sites, then you need to change that too.

Although this article speaks to SEO companies mainly, I feel it is important to highlight that any website owner who reads this should look at their site or at least speak to their webmaster to correct any problems that might cause their site to “sin”.

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