Poor Layout
Recently I was asked by a local artist to look at her website and tell her why nobody could find it in Google. Here was a website that felt wrong even before I checked out the source code. It was a fixed-size design which was centred horizontally but not vertically – an early sign of laziness on the part of the designer. But that was nothing compared to what I was about to uncover.
No SEO
There were no keywords in the metatags, so naturally some of the major search engines were severely disadvantaged. How could they rank a web page which didn't have the keywords by which it was supposed to be measured? This was the "index" page, otherwise known as the "home" or "landing" page which I was looking at, the most important page for search engine optimisation (SEO), and I was at once both upset for the artist concerned and angry on my own behalf with whoever had put this monstrosity together.
Old-Style Ignorance
But it was worse than I suspected. What appeared to be text in this first page had in fact been flattened into an image file so there was no legible text for search engine bots to scan. There are also serious implications here regarding accessibility – partially sighted people using text readers would find a blank page!
This same page used Tables for formatting its layout rather than Divisions, and a ridiculous image map for navigation. These techniques have been deprecated for years and in this case had turned what should have been a short bit of clean code into an auto-generated nightmare.
Exposed Email Address
The remainder of the website was no better: a thumbnail image gallery which could only show the larger image in a new blank page which had to be closed before one could select the next image, and a contact page with an unprotected email address ripe for attack by harvesters (evil bots which scan such sites to add email addresses to their databases for spamming purposes). Luckily for my new client, the email address associated with her old site had a permanent error and any email sent to it was being automatically returned to the sender, so at least she hadn't been inundated with spam!
Computer Experts
I won't name names, but suffice it to say that these local "computer experts" should know better than to state on their own website: "We optimise your site for Google and all other major search engines". They should be ashamed of themselves.
