Part 3: Factors that Affect Search Engine Ranking
o Domain Extension – New extensions are not always immediately recognized by the search engines. This was a problem for .cc and .biz sites in the early going.
o Sub domains – If your web site is ‘mysite.network.com, and ‘network.com’ has engaged in any unsavory search engine spamming, your site will be affected.
o Always get your own domain, even if you use a sub domain for your shopping cart, etc…
o IP Address/Range – This is a bit like the last point. If the search engines have had problems with many sites from one hosting company, they may degrade all the sites from that company’s IP range. It makes the hosting companies behave.
o “Domain in use since” The longer it’s live the better it’s generally viewed. Kind of a respect thy elder’s thing…
o Negatives That Affect Your Position Within The Search Engines
o Broken links – Internally and outgoing.
o Meta tag Stuffing – Having large bloat of text in Meta description or keywords.
o Irrelevance – If you use irrelevant keywords, description with regards to the content of the site.
o Tiny Text. – If you use text that is too small for the eye to see.
o Invisible Text – Text the same color as the background.
o Meta Refresh Tag Redirects – Where when you try and get to one page, but the address changes to a different one.
o Excessive Search Engine Submission – over submitting may get your site banned.
o Frames – Be careful when you use them. You need to embed key terms in them, because generally, the search engines can only see the frame, and not the primary content that you see as visible.
o Missing Alt Attributes – This is a mandatory code element for img tags and is viewed as bad coding.
o Compounded Words in the content, or tags will not help the web site for individual terms – i.e. – ‘specialriskinsurance’ as opposed to ‘special risk insurance’ or ‘special-risk-insurance’.
o Excessive punctuation in the TITLE and description tags – wastes precious space, and some characters are ignored or may cause a problem with the spider (the pipe “|” is a great one that should be avoided).
