There are many methods that webmasters can employ to increase their search engine placement that are included under the envelope of search engine optimisation. The idea is that this search engine optimisation improves the visibility of their site to the spiders or robots sent out by the different search engines. Every time a person enters a particular word or phrase into a search engine the engines send out their spiders to index every page that they come across. The spiders find these pages in two ways - either directly, from the main search engine database, or via links from these pages. The results of this searching are then returned to the surfer in an index form. Basically, the order that the pages are displayed in this index depends on a number of different factors. For example, some search engines want link popularity to be the most important criterion, while others prefer meta tags. It is these factors that a webmaster needs to address when he wants to improve his website’s ranking and he needs to form a search engine optimisation strategy. Knowing what the search engine spiders do not like is just as important, if not more so, than knowing what they do like.

There are a number of unethical search engine optimisation techniques that many search engines have become aware of. These will lead to your pages being blacklisted and should be avoided at all costs. No matter whether your site has a high level of legitimate search engine optimisation in other ways, if it includes any of the following then all the hard work will be wasted as the search engines will not list your site:


• meta refresh tags
• invisible text
• overuse of tiny text
• irrelevant keywords in the title and meta tags
• excessive repetition of keywords
• overuse of mirror sites (same sites that point to different URLs)
• submitting too many pages in one day
• identical or nearly identical pages

A number of web design features can cause problems for the search engines and should be avoided if you want to increase your level of search engine optimisation. The two main issues are the use of frames and also dynamic created pages.
Quite simply, the use of frames is not going to help with your search engine optimisation – no matter how fantastic the content is within the frames. This is because the search engines have a hard time indexing frames. The same applies to dynamic content. Once a search engine spider reaches a page that contains dynamically updated pages they stop and do not index further pages. If this happens to be on the first page of your website then you are going to be included a long way down the search engine’s index and lose a lot of potential visitors to the rest of your website and have wasted time employing all the right search engine optimisation techniques on subsequent pages.

There are many strategies that you can employ whilst performing search engine optimisation on your site. As part of any decent search engine optimisation plan it is important to check that you do not have anything that will stop the search engine spiders from finding, and indexing, your entire website’s content.

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