The Negative Effects Of Splash Pages - May 9th, 2008

When you work in Search Engine Optimisation you come across many different websites, some great sites and some not so great sites but one thing that is sure to hinder your campaign weather you have an amazing site or a less than great site is a splash page. A splash page is a page that loads when you go to a website but it isn’t the homepage, its a page before, usually with an animation on it and a single button to move onto the homepage of the site.

Splash pages can have a negative effect on your website from two different angles. From an SEO perspective and also from a usability perspective.

When it comes to SEO your homepage is the strongest page on your website, this is because it should have good indexable content with a nice menu structure that can be spidered easily by the search engines. Your inner pages feed from the link juice (page rank) that is taken from your homepage that receives all the links to your site and with a good internal linking structure your site can benefit from this. When you use a splash page you are effectively robbing your website of its strongest page. Your average splash page will contain no content as its usually an image or some flash and it will only have link on the page, A worst case scenario is that that one link or redirect that is used to get to your homepage will be embedded in flash which would mean in the eyes of Google your website would consist of 1 page with no content on it. If this was the case Google would not give this page any relevance to any keywords. Even if the link or redirect could be seen by Google and it followed then what should be your best page is now considered as an inner page for the site.

The second negative effect of a splash page is from a Usability point of view. If you are a large site like a brand such as Nike then i would consider this to be less of a problem as your users will probably be there because they know your site and they have not just stumbled across it searching for something. If you are a smaller site then a splash page can be a problem for your site. When it comes to usability a website has approximately 3 seconds to keep the attention of a user before they hit the back button or they navigate away. Usually a splash page will not provide enough content on the page to keep a users attention. Also a splash page makes more work for the user to find the homepage let alone what they came to the website to look for.

So next time you are having a website designed or if you are thinking of a re-design remember these two vital reasons not to have a splash page because with poor SEO and poor usability you could end up with very few users.

Gary
NSEO Programmer

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SEO Mistakes - May 8th, 2008

The web is overflowing with the sites which are not indexed on search engines. The reason for this is their website structure, back-end programming and non search-friendly design mistakes. Being an SEO programmer I would like to mention some of the search engine optimisation mistakes that are made.

The biggest mistake I would say is designing the website first and then optimising it. In fact search engine optimisation should be the main component of the design process. It could cost a lot of money and time if we do search optimisation as an afterthought. So it is recommended to have a search optimisation specialist involved in the early stage of the design process.

Once the optimisation process has been started the big mistake many people make is choosing the keywords. In most cases people choose keywords which are in their mind and are descriptive of their website but an average user just may not use them. Google tools can be used to find which keywords are good for your website.

Leaving the title tag empty is also very common. Don?t forget that the title tag is very important for on-page optimisation. And it?s an important place to have a keyword.

Flash is attractive but it?s not search engine friendly. If you really want to use it and you want to make your website search engine friendly then provide an html version of your website.

The same is the case for JavaScript. It is not search engine friendly either, so if you really want to use JavaScript for navigation then provide a sitemap.

Images look better than text but again they are not search engine friendly. Header tags should be used instead of images. But if you are afraid that they will make your site look horrible then try to modify them with a style sheet.

Backlinks are important to get a good ranking on search engines but remember that you should always go for quality rather than quantity.

Nadeem
SEO Programmer

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