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So many people want their website to rank high on the first page of the Google search results but they aren’t truly prepared to do what it takes to get those top rankings.

The SEO foundation of your website is most important to the success of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign.   Not all websites are built “SEO Friendly” and those code  errors need to be corrected or you are undermining your SEO rank potential.

It is no fun at all to have spent a lot of money or time on a website that looks great only to find out that it is not search engine friendly at all.

What does “search engine friendly” mean?

A search engine friendly website has clean HTML code that does not block the spiders from crawling it, and does not consist of fundamental elements that the engines have a problem with.

Here are just a few of the elements that are common search-engine-friendly issues:

  • URLs are dynamic with tons of parameters in the URL (Google likes simple URL’s)
  • The site has no sitemap (not just good for search engine crawlers, but good for the human visitor, too)
  • Site is built with session IDs (Do you really need them?)
  • Page URLs do not contain any relevant keywords
  • Navigation the engines can’t follow (Does your navigation flow from one page to the next and then take the visitor back home, or are they left struggling to find their own way back home?)
  • Internal CSS code or java script on-page
  • Site does not contain proper meta tags
  • Site contains hidden code
  • Site is built in frames (Use external CSS instead)
  • Extraneous and lengthy code which the engines have to crawl through before they get to your content code
  • The site was built with SiteBuilder software that doesn’t allow for proper code editing or SEO optimization

It is difficult when you find out your website isn’t designed to be SEO friendly and that it’s going to take some work, more time and money to get things fixed.   However, it doesn’t fix itself and if you ignore it, it WILL NOT go away!   And the other truth is that if you are not willing to have the issues corrected, you are going to be limiting your own search results in the search engines.

Adding fresh content to your website regularly and getting inbound links to your site from other websites/blogs is definitely a good idea, but if your website doesn’t have a solid SEO foundation you are going to limit the benefit of that work and hinder your rankings.

There are things in life we can avoid, and there are things that hurt us if we continue to avoid them.   If you aren’t sure if your site is search engine friendly, it’s a good idea to find out quickly and address the problem, either by doing it yourself or by hiring an SEO expert to do it for you.   It isn’t going to go away and it could actually get worse as the engines continue to tweak their criteria and demand more adjustments and compliance from websites over time.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing Secrets • Words of Wisdom

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