SEO Fixes For Older Web Sites
Written By: Joe
Flitner
For a lot of my clients, older sites that were once
high ranking, have disappeared off the radar. They chalk it up to more
competition and lax SEO upkeep, but oftentimes, the websites themselves
are the culprit. I found a relationship between older coding methods
and the breakdown between title/url/header content and actual body
content. I wanted to take a few minutes to address some issues with
older sites and how obsolete code may be hurting their rankings.
Tables
5-15
years ago, if text, data and graphics had to be aligned in anyway, most
people were using tables. They’re still using them, and as search
engines become more sophisticated, they are starting to read all of the
table code as content, and this is shooting websites down by the
hundreds.
A client of mine brought me a website that was created
about five years ago, and sure enough, it was riddled with tables and
all the set up code required to facilitate them. The code to content
ratio was 34k to 3k. A keyword density check revealed that six of the
top ten keywords were actually from the table code. Ouch.
The
website in question had been tanking in the rankings for sometime, and
this was my chief concern. With the development of CSS and PHP, it
isn’t necessary to clutter up a page with formatting on the page
itself. His problem was solved by overhauling the website with a new
design (at his request) and all of the layouts and navigation were
organized using CSS and PHP to get the same visual results without
making the code such a mess and making a nightmare of the SEO.
ASCII and HTML Codes
Tricky
symbols oftentimes make it necessary to insert ASCII or preferably HTML
codes into a web page in place of an alphanumeric character.
Unfortunately, much like the code from tables, ASCII and HTML code get
read literally by spiders and can artificially affect the best keywords
on the page.
The most common culprit is ™. Commonly entered
multiple times on a page where a trademarked product is mentioned for
keyword emphasis, this symbol (either
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© Copyright 2009, John A. Simpson. All Rights Reserved.
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It always goes back to Google…they’re king and there’s not much we can do about it unless we don’t care.
-Mike