Top SEO problems for UK websites

Through our offer to carry out a free website assessment we review a large number of websites each month, which often have common problems. Here we list our top issues which may affect you, or could be useful to avoid in the future!

Flash Websites – Any content embedded in Flash content is invisible to search engines, as Flash is stored in a compiled ‘binary’ format. Therefore, a website which is built entirely using Flash will provide very little content for the search engines to consider. We would always recommend using HTML for a website, and if there is a certain element that requires animation or other functionality provided by Flash, this should be added as an embedded section within the HTML page.

Non-separate URLs for different products or pages – Most search engines are still at the stage where they will only follow standard HTML links to different content within a website, this can mean that any website that can display different content within the same URL (web address) may not be able to get all of its content indexed. This is particularly common for websites that:

• Use new technology such as AJAX to change elements of the page ‘on the fly’ within the page reloading.
• Use ‘forms’ to pass users between different content on the site.

In most cases both of the above techniques should really only be used to provide functionality (such as a checkout cart) or tools on a site, and not as the only route to displaying key information or content.

A ‘.com’ or other top level domain not hosted in the UK – For a website targeting the UK market, this will mean that the site will not appear in ‘pages from the UK’ results on the main search engines. For a new website solely targeting the UK, the best solution is always to use a .uk domain such as .co.uk, or if the site is exists and uses a top level domain, the site should be hosted in the UK.

Duplicate content (the same content on more than one page) – Most search engines will aim to filter multiple instances of the same content, so that each piece of content just appears once in their search results. Here are two possible situations where this can cause a problem, although more exist:

If you have a website served under more than one domain (such as .com and .co.uk), the search engines may filter the website that you would prefer to promote (such as the website with more links coming into it). The solution here is to decide on a preferred website and set up ’301′ redirects from all the other domains to the prefered site.

If you have a site which can display the same content by typing in two different of URLs the search engines may filter your prefered page, or issue a penalty. It is possible to tell the search enigines not to index all the non prefered pages by adding a ‘noindex’ metatag to the code of each page.

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