What Not To Do With Your Website

Creating a website has never been more straightforward, except that while pretty much anyone can create a website, not everyone can create a good one. For a website to be effective it has to be attractive, engaging and easy for visitors to navigate around. You need to optimise your site, and there are certain things around content you can do to ensure this. However, there are also certain things you must not do, or risk penalising your site when it comes to search engine rankings.

Keyword Stuffing

This is where you basically cram as many keywords as possible into your site in the hope that this will drive up your Google ranking. The myth persists that the more keywords you include, the more likely it is that search engines will interpret this density as relevancy and reward your site accordingly. Keyword density is not an important metric. Use your keywords intelligently and logically, like you would other words. Most importantly, your site should make sense, and stuffing it full of keywords is likely to have the opposite effect. Remember, the value in your site comes from its usability.

Distracting Adverts

There is evidence that people dislike digital ads pretty much more than any other kind of advert. Pop up ads are particularly disruptive when it comes to the user experience of a website. If you allow annoying ads onto your site you run the very real risk of alienating your site visitors, which means they won’t be hanging around to see what you’ve got for them.

Down on the Link Farm

A popular form of web spam is manipulative linking, whereby you link to a fake or low value site which is only set up for this purpose. These sites are known as link farms. Genuine links have value in ranking your site on search engines, but link farms definitely do not. Other forms of manipulative link acquisition include reciprocal link exchange deals with other sites and paid links. Ultimately these are much more likely to harm your site’s Google rankings than enhance them.

Saying it Again, and Again

Search engines do not like duplicate content. If Google does find two identical pieces of text, whether on one site, or between two sites, it will only index one of the pages. Pretty much everyone adapts and reconfigures content for their own purposes, but resist the temptation to simply copy and paste: it could cost you a lot in terms of where your site gets listed, or indeed whether it gets listed at all. At LV Media we specialise in web design covering Manchester, Stockport and the North West. We understand the dos and don’ts surrounding websites and how to ensure your website is dynamic and effective. Give us a call.

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