Ranking high in Search Engines is the goal for many website owners. You should be aware this is easier if your website has been designed from the ground up, to be friendly to search engines. Make sure you work with a web designer who understands the requirements of search engines. Here are some of the top mistakes often seen on websites:

Multiple Domains and Website Clones

If you have multiple domains that all display the same website, with the hope you will get more traffic, you are sadly mistaken. If you have a number of domains displaying the same website, the search engines will see that as duplicate content. Search engines will only give credit to one domain name for each piece of content. If you need more than one domain name, it would be better to simply redirect the domain to your primary domain name so that one domain name gets all the credit for the content you have created.

Even if you are a franchisee of a large group of companies, you need to have your own unique website content. If you just use a “cookie cut” version of the main company’s site, you will get very little search engine traffic, if any. Due to the duplicate content rule mentioned above, the main site will get all the credit from the search engines, not your cloned site. If you want your franchise business to really work for you, take the time to have your own content written, or better still have a website designed specifically for your franchise.

Poor Quality Website Coding

There are web designers out there that don’t design sites with the search engines in mind. Sites with poor quality code will not attract the attention of search engines, resulting in poor results for your business. Search engines will not place your site highly on their results if your site looks like it’s built poorly. They will make the judgement call that your site is not as useful as others and will not take you seriously.

Black Hat SEO

Although there are many web designers that claim they also do search engine marketing, be careful who you use. Stay away from those offering any techniques designed to ‘trick’ the search engines into ranking you highly when you probably don’t deserve it. These deceptive techniques are called ‘black-hat’ and in the end will probably be found out and get your site completely banned from search engines.

If it is search engine optimisation or SEO services that you want, it is best to go to reputable specialists who only work with White Hat SEO techniques. They will have specialised technical abilities and savvy marketing skills which follow the guidelines of search engines to rank highly. Expertise in web design and development does not always mean your developer understands marketing or SEO, so check this out to make sure you have the right people doing the right job.