Thursday, August 14, 2008

8 Reasons Your Web Site is Underperforming (That You Don't Already Know)

A web site's ranking and user experience are affected by many things you may not know because they're beyond the HTML on the web pages themselves. They can help or hurt your search engine ranking and your user's experience.

  1. Domain name not registered for maximum length; Google and others take domains registered for many years more seriously

  2. Server response time is slow and/or uptime is low

  3. Server and/or name servers are in a "bad neighborhood"

  4. Server hosts other sites too
    • looks like you are not as serious and are not stable enough to weather a spike in traffic (e.g., the Slashdot effect)
    • at risk of server going down, and taking your site with it, if another site on the server has an error or spike in traffic (slash-dotted/dugg)
  5. no robots.txt file

  6. no valid xml sitemaps

  7. Dynamic looking URLs; they have a "?" in them

  8. Character encoding mismatches
    • encoding declared in the HTTP headers doesn't match the encoding declared in the page's meta tag
    • Encoding on the actual page doesn't match either the encoding declared in the header and/or in the meta tag

There are also lots of things that affect your success that are on the web page; subscribe to learn more about those too.

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