1. If you have a website, or planning to launch a new site; make sure to learn from millions of other webmasters whove learnt it the hard way by following these tips to avoid embarrassment. 23 Website No No's Content, Design and SEO Donts

2. Overview Content No No's Site Design, Architecture and Navigation No No's Search Engine Optimization No No's 3. Content No No's 4. Duplicate Content Never copy paste the content from other websites or sources. It can cause serious troubles with search engine rankings. Also be ready to face legal actions from the actual owners. Image Courtesy: www.tweakandtrick.com 5. No Clear Message Have a clear message for your users. Explain what your site is all about and how can they make use of your information /products/ services. Image Courtesy: www.penmachine.com 6. Bad Content / poor writing Have relevant, well written and grammatically correct content. 7. All caps content All Caps text is harder to read. It creates a rectangular form making it hard on our eyes. We read words by shape, not individual letters. Choosing all caps will also give the appearance that you are shouting your message. 8. Blinking Text Gone are the days when blinking text used to attract eyeballs. Now it just irritates! Image Courtesy: www.theatlantic.com 9. Learn More with Nothing More Make sure your Learn More buttons lead to more information about the topic. Taking Visitors to the top of the same page or having a broken link are absolute No Nos. 10. Keyword Stuffing You can no longer fool the search engines by repeating the keyword many times in your content to achieve high search engine ranking. Image Courtesy: www.itsabhik.com 11. Long chunks of content Web users attention span is shorter than book readers. Break your content into short, meaningful paragraphs and use proper headlines and sub- headlines. 12. Site Design, Architecture and Navigation No No's 13. Long Load Time Dont stuff your site with heavy images and graphics which leads to long load time. 14. Going Overboard with Images and Colors It is very easy to get caught up in color schemes but they can be very hard on the eyes, especially if for older viewers. It is best to stick to two complimentary colors, three at most. 15. Poor Navigation Structure In this example, how on earth can you expect the user to navigate? Make sure to have a clear and focused navigation structure to help users find out what they want. 16. Poor Legibility Is your content readable? Make sure to use a good font in the right size and you follow a good color scheme for the text as well as background. 17. Auto Start Videos Its better not to automate the start of a video when the site loads up. Leave the control to users. 18. No Contact Info It is just like telling your user to go find yourself. Preferably, give your physical office or business location with contact numbers or at least an option for them to send an email. Also connect to your social media profiles from the site. Image Courtesy: www.iwantcovers.com 19. Having No Call to Action What is the objective of your site? Lead generation? Direct Sales? Whatever is your objective, drive them to that action by placing appropriate Call to Action Buttons. 20. Too Many ADs This is a no brainer. Never have too many ads on your site. 21. Collect Only Essential Information Make your lead capture form as simple as possible. Collect only essential and minimum details based on your product or service offering. This would increase your conversion rate. However, it is a good practice to add a few extra fields if you think it increases the quality of lead. 22. Personal Twitter/Facebook feed Dont show your personal social media feeds on your professional or business site. 23. Search Engine Optimization No No's 24. Not Having Unique Page Titles and Meaningful Meta Description Having unique and meaningful page titles and meta description is very important from a search engine ranking perspective. Page titles play a reasonably good role in conveying what the page is about to search engines. What you give as meta description for a page is what the users see when they see your site in search engine results. If it is not meaningful, why would they visit your site? 25. Lack of Fresh Content Image Courtesy: theclutch.commercialwebservices.com 26. Irrelevant Links Make sure you are linking out to (and getting links from) sites which are relevant to your subject /industry. Linking to and irrelevant sites can annoy your users as well as search engines. 27. Dirty URL Structure A dirty URL doesnt provide any descriptive value to humans or search engines. URL names should have meaningful text and keywords in them, not gibbering numbers and punctuation marks. The best practice is to separate the words in your url with a hyphen. For example - http://blog.socialmaximizer.com/14-tips-for-marketing-on- facebook/. Also try to limit the charcaters in your url within 65. 28. Hidden content Till few years back, spammers used to stuff keywords in the content for manipulating search engine rankings and hide the content from site visitors. Now search engine algorithms are smarter! Dont attempt it. 29. Does your site show up in search results when users search with your targeted keywords? Click to learn search engine optimization tips on http://blog.directorymaximizer.com