So you have seen the hundreds of SEO consultancies out there, every man and his dog are now experts in the field of SEO but lets look at their sites and check for the deadly sins. I’m not going to name names but some of the biggest SEO companies fail these really simple steps for well optimised pages. But what are the deadly sins, well read on…
the Deadly sins
- No Alt attribute in image tags, this is a double sin from an SEO point of view your missing out on valuable method of adding more keywords without penalty but your also failing to meet W3C guide lines on accessibility and therefore fail the most important rule in SEO Design a site for a Human and a search engine will follow
- Tables, tables are for tabular data not content! While tables may be easier to use then CSS they are not helping your search engine rankings, as they make it difficult for the engine to determine what is content, and what is tabular data content. As the engines become more aware of semantic structure of a page, table based designs will suffer even greater penalties.
- Headings, What’s wrong with using H1/2/3 tags? their seems to be a bizarre trend away from these useful tags the reason for this trend is unclear but the need for these tags is once again to provide semantic information to the search engines. The heading tags provide both hierarchical structure as well as a means to create keyword rich titles.
- Images instead of text, sites with whole paragraphs embedded within images making it completely inaccessible both to humans and search engines. using any binary data to display text is a sin including flash
- Doctype / Language, two issues here one not declaring a doc type on a page, this might be considered a minor sin, but you must rememmber unless you declare a doc type search engines will work on best guesses as to what that type might be, not so much of an issue today but it could be in the future. Declaring a language however is an issue, particularly if the language on the page is not English, international search engines determine a pages language via a meta tag which includes a two letter acronym. So if the site is in French the acronym is FR while en-GB is English without a language your site will be either listed as unknown or dumped in the American English categories.
- robots.txt & htaccess two simple files to control how and where people see your site, one for humans the other bots, but why are people not using them or worse I have actually come across sites that have robots.txt files with disallow all, blocking bots from crawling.
This is a short list, but if your an SEO company and your selling your services make sure your site doesn’t commit one of the deadly sins and if your site does then fix it 
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March 14, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Amen Brother!
Those points are all extremely important in my books!
One that you could add to the alt attributes is the title attribute for links, also a good keyword “spot”.
Chris
March 14, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Good point and one I tend to preach till I’m blue in the face, perhaps not a deadly sin not to include a title attribute but it certainly helps
March 14, 2007 at 10:02 pm
The facts are so true, and have been for a very long time. The sad part is…people forget to go for what has been steadfast. I would of course add (and not mentioned here or in feedback yet) a static html sitemap, a google xml site map, and yes, naming pages with approriate keyword phrase, and of course proper title and descriptions. Navigation that can be followed by engines, and site theme should be easy to understand for engines. How about bolding of keywords and enbedded text links. All part of a web site design and seo proper
Bonnie Burns
March 14, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Good points and all basic but are ones which people forget when developing a site for se readiness. May I also add, sitemaps that are static, google xml sitemap, naming pages with keyword phrase, naming pictures with keywords, development of site based on site theme, embedded text links, bolding of keywords phrases, embedded text links…I can go on…but must get back to work
Bonnie Burns
March 15, 2007 at 8:55 am
Thanks to the team. These are very valid points to consider for any site, including my own. You made me stop to think about whether I am practicing what I preach.
I commented regarding your article on my site at http://www.mantaseosolutions.com/news/news.php?id=30. I hope that is alright with you ?
March 15, 2007 at 2:50 pm
RE: REW Blog. Oops, I changed the title from 10 to 6 deadly sins. Thanks for the correction. No need to write 4 more, however, there is probably plenty of fodder to do so!
March 15, 2007 at 5:30 pm
[...] website basics again today. I was just about to generate a list of my own when I came across a great list at The Venture Skills Blog called "Deadly Sins of SEO Sites." The post, which [...]
March 16, 2007 at 11:48 pm
I’m actually curious about Flash with regards to SEO, some sites are just flat out not going to be deep-linkable, or searchable in any way. Saying “fix it because it’s wrong” or “don’t do those kind of sites” is maybe technically correct, but in reality there are a ton of business models out there that are concerned with aesthetics first and compliance dead last, and that’s their choice. Just because some or even most people want the web to work as one giant searchable repository, that’s not how some people are using it. And in fact it doesn’t actually mean they’ll fail. It all depends on the business you are in. There’s got to be a middle ground somewhere, so that businesses can still get traffic, but maybe not have to redundantly expose all their content to the web or have a dedicated presentation and content layer. If anyone has any ideas on where to read more about this I’d be glad to know.
March 17, 2007 at 12:18 am
Hi Rick there is a pretty easy middle ground, don’t use flash for content. Adobe is working hard with search engine companies to get flash indexed correctly, but even then you still have the accessibility issue, a company in Europe using exclusively flash without offering alternative html or other version is breaching the various disability acts and can face heavy fines.
For sites that refuse to stop using flash, there is only really one way to get any content indexed and that ’s using xml or XHTML pages and server side parsing to check for flash, so if you have flash installed you see a pretty site otherwise you see the XML. I may well do a demo of this if its something people would be interested in.
March 19, 2007 at 1:04 am
Biggest mistake I see with anyone’s site let alone SEO’s is the company name first in the title tag! That just blows my mind. The other is tables for layout, like you said, and no Heading tags. I learned within the last two years to get away from WYSIWYG editors like Frontpage and hand code with CSS and XHTML using TopStyle. Why is is so hard for people to switch to CSS for layout? My site redesign launched two months ago and my hits and visits doubled immediately just from layout changes and using valid markup. The theme and keywords are the same too.
March 27, 2007 at 9:43 am
[...] This article comes from a blog post by “The Venture Skills Blog” - see http://ventureskills.wordpress.com/2007/03/13/deadly-sins-of-seo-sites [...]
March 29, 2007 at 10:34 pm
[...] wrote a short article on the Deadly sins of SEO websites these sins were on the whole received well by readers though one blogger did I feel miss [...]
April 8, 2007 at 8:43 pm
It’s really works for me.Thanks dude.
April 10, 2007 at 9:37 am
Really good 6 points, they are really easy to do but people use to forget them.
i like the article.
Oskar Calvo.
April 21, 2007 at 11:03 am
[...] part in the algo of most search engines, if you’ve done the SEO basics and not committed any deadly SEO sins, you’ve worked on producing good content, now you want to start ranking [...]
May 20, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Whilst I can find nothing to disagree with here I am extremely surprised that you only mention alt tags and not their partner title tags - if you want to have a picture work properly for both people and bots then the title tag MUST be there - remember - firefox uses these tags properly. No title - no pop on hover…
May 20, 2007 at 9:49 pm
When we drew up our deadly sins the title attribute was hotly debated, but it was decided that the ALT tag was the sin, worryingly people seem to use the two interdependently one of the important things is to remember you can not use the title attribute without the alt but can use the alt without title hence its inclusion
October 2, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I agree every man, women and dog are now SEO experts, I simply check the websites of these self proclaimed experts and within a few seconds I know if they understand anything about fundamentals of SEO.