Search engines hate my site !

Ok, not actually my site, but some clients I have worked with in the past seemed convinced the cigar smoking bigwigs at certain search engine companies had a personal vendetta against them. I can apreciate the desire to increase traffic to your website, I have my own as well that I'd like to see improved (and it is gradually) but a word of caution. In the case of SEO, or more specifically on site / page SEO, too much is really too much.

In other words, sometimes in an effort to tweak your site to be more search engine freindly you wind up over optimizing it, or worse, triggering penalties by perceived black hat SEO tactics.

There is no silver bullet or point and click method that results in instant search engine success. Anyone trying to sell you one should probably be slapped, or at least ignored. Effective SEO is much more about knowing what not to do, than it it is stuffing in the latest whizzbang method into your pages.

To me, that is as it should be. Websites that are created poorly and look like thousands of other sites should not outshine sites where the webmaster has worked hard to provide quality content that is unique.

If you've been at this a while, you are probably tired of reading "content is king!" so that is my only mention of it, but how about "legible text is paramount!" or "the importance of predominantly unique and grammatically correct authoring should not be underestimated". Ok, that last one was a bit long, but you get my drift.

Something I suggest.. open a copy or notepad or whatever text editor you use. Browse to your home page, hit crtl+A key to select all text then ctrl+C top copy it. Now paste that into notepad. Reading it, if it isn't obvious what the site is about within the first few sentences you should probably consider changing your layout. This is essentially what Googlebot and other search engines see, and what they use to attempt to categorize your site.

Note, when I say "consider changing your layout" I don't necessarily mean changing the look or placement of your textual content. The goal is to get the unique and relevant text closer to the top when viewing the HTML source of your pages. Using CSS positioning, that text can be displayed wherever you like.

Another shoot yourself in the foot tactic I often find is large amounts of inline styles and java script within the HEAD tags of HTML pages. Whenever possible these should be moved and referenced from external files, like style.css or functions.js Search engine bots really don't care about how the page is styled and typically don't run java script, so why make them wade through it. Again, getting your unique and relevant text closer to the opening BODY tag.

I've just realized I probably have a hundred other SEO blunders to cover, but the last not so good idea I'll mention here is the overstuffed deceptively flattering sitemap.xml approach...

Overstuffed.. It is not necessary to mention every URL of your site in the sitemap.xml If your site has a dozoen or so pages, then it's likely fine, but hundreds? Probably too many, thousands? Definitely too many.

Just ensure your sitemap.xml file has your most important sections of your website possibly /blog , /forums, /contact, /about etc. You do not need every URL. If your site has reasonable navigation the search engine spiders can follow the links to the remainder of your site.

Deceptively flattering.. I may have mentioned this before, but all too often I run across sitemap.xml files where every URL has an importance of 1.0 and or is updated daily. Really!? C'mon be honest. If /contact is updated daily then you must be an under cover agent or maybe a paid assasin.

The point is, be realistic. /forum likely does get new content every day, /blog might be daily, weekly .. or if you are lazy like me monthly. So yes, be honest and realistic when assigning importance and update frequency in your sitemaps.