Surprisingly website design companies are still making errors when advising sites for their clients. Before you engage in writing your own website or having one scripted for you try to avoid the ballpark booby traps:

1. No keyword research – writing or even pricing internet sites prior to doing any keyword research is a fundamental sin – if you do not know what visitors thrive for on the World Wide Web how can you approach to write a website that meets customers demands let alone know the strength of your competition. It will have the same effect as you standing near the fast lane of a motorway holding a mailing card.

2. No challenger research – you wouldn’t add an ad in the yellow pages without looking to see who’s publicizingadvertising in the crucial component and how big their add is – yet most of us would have a website written without looking at how good/bad your challengerwebsites are or how many backlinks they have accumulated. Ok I can hear the SEO’s shouting its all about backlink quality – yes but without a rudimentary guide you will not know whether your site 1 contenders  have 30 or 30,000 backlinks on intermediate – for example the term web design has 138 million pages listed in Google and moneysupermarket who’s number one has 306,000 backlinks – any professional website design companies estimate their opportunities – reach me with a bag full of euros! My point is: be informed, be realistic and before you pen down a website choose effective niche terms where you have some chance of getting to page 1 or 2 of SERPs.

3. Deficiency of Subject – do you seriously intend to outrank your competitor with a 5 page website when your competitor’s site has 100s of keywords related websites? Numerous people think they can – it’s a common illusion. Check your  rivals websites in Google with site:domainname.com and write lots of outstanding content.

4. Deficiency of Website Planning – if you don’t plan your pages then you will miss things out. Everything ought be planned: page names, directory names, titles, headings, footers, css menu text, link text & paragraphs, decent graphics as well as overall position of points on page. Good planning – leads to good keyword prominence & avid usability.   

5. No time/budget for marketing – web designers are all to keen to take their clients money but neglect to educate clients that unless their market domain is un-contended it’s unlikely that the client will rank solely on conception & keywords. So if your intention is to publish a internet site to drive some income and haven’t got a mediocre marketing plan or search engine marketing budget then take your friends/family on a good vacation and lay to rest the website – dollars better spent!

6. Using Known spoiled parts – such as frames, excess script, flash intros, thick graphics may result in longer page load times and bulky HTML. Its best practice today for web designer to utilize text based link menus, external cascading style sheets to get rid of on page code  & enhance keyword density.

7. Missing Keywords in H1 H2 H3 H4 – search engines such as Google try to send out internet sites with text corresponding to the keyword/s hacked in. Keywords in headings are rated as more important than keywords in sentences but both are necessary – this is often forgotten.

8. No Dedicated Landing Pages – for instance if the branch you are developing a site for is a web design company – other than your home page – its is good practice to write a separate sites about web design & any other specialties such as AJAX web design, adult web design etc. Users are expecting to see content related to their search term – thus a landing page which fits the bill is exactly what the doc ordered – if your website misses out these do something about it.

9. Missing or Poorly used Titles – title tags are commonly forgotten by web designers & where these are filled they are most commonly done in a rush – ‘Joe Blogs Home Page’. Title tags show up on title bar of your browser window & are commingly on line 1 of organic SERP listing hence are vital and ought incorporate your most commonly used keywords – filling these in thoughtlessly is in-fact more destructive than leaving these blank. Titles should not exceed 65 chars the word that crosses that limit and any further words will not be indexed (in Google anyway).

10. Lacking or Crappy Used Description Meta – web coders often don’t pay any attention to the description meta tag – this tag usually shows up on line 2 of an organic search engine position listing thus is quite important. Using correct keywords here helps towards SERP ranking – filling descriptions without any aimed keywords is in-fact worse than leaving these blank. Description Meta should not exceed 150 characters the word that crosses that limit and any further words will not be indexed(Google).

11. Bad Use Of Site Names – this again is all too common, if a page is about web design then name is ‘web-design’ or ‘web_design’ and try to avoid joining words: webdesign. Correctly named pages count towards good ranking by supporting to transport the message as to what the site is about.

12. Avoid Image based Navigation – whilst many designers are aware of this there is still a small part that use anchored pictures – Google checks internal anchor text when indexing pages & this adds up towards the final SERP positions – avoid it but if you have to use it then use alt tags..

13. Poor Positions of Keyworded Headings – your primary keyworded slogan should show up near the top of the page, this seems obvious but is all too often underestimated – sometimes referred to as keyword prominence.

14. Poor use of Colours – yea Dulux are right you do need an eye for colour – preferably no more than 3 colours for your theme, take care though as certain colours have uttermost importance in some cultures – keep off luminous colour themes. If you don’t have access to Adobe Illustrator (has a neat colour match tool) then type HTML colours or mooColorfinder in your preferred search enigne and you will find a few nifty utilities.

15. Poor Layout & Script Control – OK if you only have a few pages to write then its ok to write pages in Vanilla X/HTML – just bear in mind that you will get to a point where you will need to make some layout or menu changes and then you will have to do this to every page – moan! Most developers today use the likes of PHP or ASP – in this way layout & script changes can be applied to one or many documents simultaneously thus cutting down workload. Vanilla HTML is painful on bigger sites.

16. Avoid Page Building Programs – many programs will create a pre-designed website however unless you are certain that the code generated is meets all good page building guidelines then stay clear many programs carry lots of hidden links back too themselves – the publisher needs some link love too! (There are a few programs that actually are not too bad)

17. Not Keeping to a theme – as of November 2000 many search engines use site themes as a method of indexing websites. This is where more than one page on the site is tailored to similar keyword/s. For example a site with the following pages leather shoes, beach shoes, school shoes would be indexed as a site about shoes – the objective by search engines here is to deliver websites that match the term searched ahead of single pages, hence not conveying the right message throughout the pages of the website could result in lower position in SERPs – many websites today fail to stick to a theme.

18. No Keywords in Domain Name – hence if you are writing a website for web design then it’s wise to have the term ‘web design’ as a part of the URL – whilst this is not essential but it does count towards your rank in SERPs

19. Poor Link Structure – just writing the pages is all very well if they are not found – most of the pages on your site should be accessible from any page – use top/side menus & footers to insure that all your pages are easily accessible.

20. No Follow Tags – if your web marketing professional does their job then you will have plenty of link love from other sites – hence any links from your page will distribute this link love through the links on your page (I’m getting confused) It is important not to pass any link love to pages that don’t matter ie pages like contact us, about us, terms. use the no follow tag on any such links. This way the user will still see the page as normal but spiders wont – easy really – use rel=”nofollow” in your anchors.

21. Stop Words in titles & Metas – such as: and, a, and, the, in, this, it, who, at – are all words that are not indexed in search engines – they have no meaning to search engines and are bypassed by crawlers – so avoid these in titles & meta tags, alt tags etc.

22. No Alt Tags for Images – where appropriate use alt tags on any images & use your keywords in these sensibly.

23. Wrong domain suffix – obvious really ie .co.uk for uk company – you will not rank well if you are trying to promote a .co.in to the UK. Here are come common UK domain suffixes:

.com – Commercial Site

.org – Non-profit organization site

.net – Site within a larger network.

.biz – Purely for Business-to-Business sites

.name – For identity purposes of an individual or organization

.info – Informational sites providing no e-commerce

.co.uk – Site based in the United Kingdom

.co.in – Site based in India

24. Hosting Overseas – Host your website in your home country ie use a UK host for .co.uk .com – for load speed as much as geolocation purposes – irrespective of how tempting overseas offers might be.

25. No redirect page – your website will change all the time – you will add and remove pages – visitors will on average visit your site 7 times before contacting you – hence seeing an 404 error is not good for business. This can be prevented by a custom error page which would give the user a page of your choice – hence making your site look more professional than your competitor.

Get yourself a real good website through professional website design, from a company that takes care of all aspects getting a successful internet presentation up and running.