SEO Tip Number 6: Blog Pages’ Crawling/Ranking Attributes

Your blog’s page ranking can also be affected by factors that prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your blog pages properly. Factors such as the amount of indexable text, coding, server accessibility, and content duplications; all have the capacity to pull your page rank down if you’re not careful and mindful about it.

Indexable Content
According to most SEO experts, pages that are “all” images, flash, frames, or java scripts rarely rank well. It is because search engines will find it hard to textually index a particular page if it contains no HTML text to associate the page with. (This is where the “image filename”, “alt”, and “title” attributes of images, --if it’s image-based not flash or java--, comes in handy.) If you have a blog post that happens to fall into this category, try putting in relevant textual descriptions, or tags to help it get indexed properly. But for better results, the next time you post, try keeping it simple and clean and their spiders will index your site a lot faster and more accurately. Of course, I don’t mean to avoid it altogether. A balance in using texts and other visual more interactive medias will always be the best way to go.

HTML Code Structure
Messy, malformed HTML makes bad-impressions from your visitors and search engines. Not only will readers find some portions of your blog hard to understand, the search engines will also find it hard to index these. Fix it once you spotted one to avoid getting underrated search engine rankings all the time.

Duplicate Contents
Content stealing is fast becoming a problem these days especially in the internet, and blog contents are frequently becoming a victim. What’s also bad is that some or maybe most of them make more money from it than you do. This is the reason why search engines try to curb these practices by giving lesser value to sites that produces replicated contents. And to avoid getting your post branded as a duplicate content, don’t copy and paste content from others. Also try to research on what you’re writing first to see if there’re other blogs or sites out there which might be something like 90% similar to what you’ll be writing. What’s bad though is if you’re the one that got stolen from and your page rank gets affected because of it. To combat “blog scrapers” kindly check these links: The Growing Trends in Content Theft, More small steps to combat content theft, Six Steps to Prevent Content Theft and Combat Copyright Infringement on Your Business Blog, Stop Content Theft Buttons and Badges.

Dead / Broken Links
Although a few of these wouldn’t hurt you, having a sizable amount of dead rotting links in your site can be dangerously detrimental. There’s nothing wrong with dead and broken links per se but your site’s credibility will eventually fall down if search engines will always find “dead-end” links which should have been pointing to a valuable resource. Additionally, it wouldn’t help your readers if the resource link you’re pointing them to is broken or dead. It’s always best to always make an effort to keep your blog free from dead/broken/dangling links. All the more if you have an old blog with tons of archived posts.

Server Performance
When your server is always down or search engines always have difficulties connecting to it, the consequence is: your ranking will suffer. It’s just simple logic actually. If search engines will always get “nothing” when they try to access your site, why do you think should they present it to people who would end up getting the same “nothing” when they access it? If your server’s always down all the time, then maybe it’s about time that you find a new server to host your site.