AFS-Inc (Advanced Formula Search) for PPC/Paid search and SEO/Natural search agency

Website design: what to avoid

Content
Web pages of websites at the top of Google natural listings have in common good writing. Remember that top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what is read on the web. Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise, considering how often officials at Google proclaim the importance of good content. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing. AFS does.

What to remember

Updating: Frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.
Spelling and grammar: Few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word's check feature, and then ruling out words marked as mis-spellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary.
Paragraphs: Primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.
Lists: Both bulleted and numbered form a large part of the text.
Sentence length: Mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.
Contextual relevance: Text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword.

What to avoid and what to do checklist?

Avoid the use of Flash pages.
Balance HTML text and graphics.
Create search-engine friendly HTML text navigation and cross-links.
Follow sound rules for redirects (no 302's only 301's).
Use external CSS and JavaScript whenever possible.
Use structural markup, and separate content from presentation as much as possible.
Provide a web site sitemap, and link to it from your homepage as well as all your other web pages.
If you use JavaScript links, include [a] element [href] attribute links within them.
Avoid dynamic URLs that contain ?, &, $, =, +, and % characters, cgi-bin, session IDs, or cookies.
Use text alternatives to Flash content.
Provide metadata and text alternatives for audio and other rich media files.
Avoid cloaking.
Avoid using doorway pages or domain names used for doorways.
Avoid stuffing keywords into comment tags or [img] element [alt] attributes.
Avoid using JavaScript or [meta-refresh] redirects to try to trick search engines.