1. Splash Page

I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage. The worst case — the “enter” link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

2. Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

3. Image and Flash Content

Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.

4. Overuse of Ajax

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

5. Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (ie. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

6. “Click Here” Link Anchor Text

You probably see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

7. Common Title Tag Mistakes

Same or similar title text: Every page on your site should have a unique tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because every single blog post will have the same text “Site Name > Blog Archive >” at the beginning of the title tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.

Exceeding the 65 character limit: Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

Keyword stuffing the title: Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:

“Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures”

“Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.

8. Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms “abstract” and “dj”.

9. Unfriendly URLs

Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL ’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

Example of Friendly URL : domain.com/page-title Example of Dynamic URL : domain.com/?p=12356

http://www.webdesignerwall.com/general/seo-guide-for-designers/

There are a few reasons why I want to swap back, the first reason is the browser display. When I check out a site with Firefox the text has a rough look to it. When I check out sites in IE, the text is very very crisp. When searching for sites or reviewing sites for the gallery I will always use IE as it has the best display.

The image below shows you my view from IE and Firefox

As you can see for yourself IE definitely looks better. Because of IE’s better visuals, all the screen shots that I take for the gallery are taken with SnagIt inside IE. To me, the screen shots do look a little bit better. Another reason why I’m thinking of dumping Firefox is Memory usage. Over the last 6 months I’ve noticed that Firefox is really starting to eat up my Memory. I do have a couple of add-ons installed but surely they can’t be the be cause of my p.c lagging up? I often find myself hitting ”Ctrl, Alt, Delete” so I can shut down the lagged out Firefox. Let’s see whats using what at the moment.

* Photoshop: 36,024 K
* IE: 20,040 K
* Firefox: 61,040 K

Just as I thought, Firefox, greedy as usual.

I’m not saying Firefox is a bad browser, far from it. It’s been an excellent tool for surfing the internet and some of the plugins are fantastic too. Flashblock is probaly my favorite. But at this moment in time, Firefox isn’t working for me. Hopefully they will have sorted out the issues I brought up here in the eagerly awaited Firefox 3?

They’ve used a heavily modified Textpattern setup, 3,100 lines of custom plugin code to be precise. Although the site is still in the bug finding/fixing stage, it looks great and runs very smoothly too. Here’s what the designer had to say about it.

We just went live today, but I consider it still very much between alpha and beta with lots of things still pretty rough and/or not quite working, but I thought I’d share it with everyone anyway. The next stage is to fix bugs and focus on social networking features. Please use the comment box at the bottom if you want!

Thanks to a bunch of folks who helped me with my questions over the past few months!!!

I think its a pretty ambitious use of Txp but so far it can handle everything we want. We’ll be upgrading the hardware soon to handle the traffic, so please excuse any slowness for now.

• Write in depth reviews of my favorite designs
• Post up tutorials
• Offer downloads
• Discussions
• Contests

The list is endless. As long as I don’t start to stray away from CMS and design, then this blog should work out nicely for both you and I.