Even though Search Engine Optimization has been a discipline for over 10 years, there are still a lot of site designs that make it hard for a search engine to make heads or tails of a website. While you would expect a certain lack of SEO knowledge from less sophisticated users and people who are new to site building, there are still quite a few cases where medium and large companies fail to consider search engines when creating a web presence.

Here are a few issues we (still) see in the year 2010, which effectively prevent a site from getting proper rankings:

• Lack of content on the homepage. There are some very big companies who believe that they can get decent search engine rankings without adding readable text to the site’s homepage. This is a huge mistake. Some of these companies will point out that Google has sparse homepage content, at which point we usually indicate that Google isn’t ranked in the top 10 for “search engine.”
• Site Designed Entirely in Flash. Adobe has made a lot of great strides in making its files readable, and should be commended for it. However, many of the designs we have seen fail to take SEO into account, so text in Flash files gets embedded into images, which aren’t read by the search engines. In many cases, the search engine sees a big blank spot when Flash is presented, so it can’t judge how relevant a site is.
• No hierarchy. For very large sites, the lack of a clear hierarchy presents a problem. The distribution of pages on a website should look like an organizational chart for a major corporation. The homepage would be the CEO, the category pages would be the directors, and so on. A lot of sites present a very wide and shallow profile, so the search engine can’t distinguish between an important category page and an ancillary product page. Hierarchies can be created using breadcrumbs, good directory structures, and HTML sitemaps, and are always recommended for sites with hundreds or thousands of pages. A Bad URL Structure can also keep pages from getting found which makes your “pyramid” look a lot smaller in the search world.
• Same Title on Every Page. Many enterprise level corporations are obsessed with branding, and want to be sure the same message appears on every title. A search engine can’t figure out the topic of each page if all the titles are the same, and the information at the left of the title is the most important. If your company name (xyz.com) starts every page title, you are robbing your site of a higher natural search engine position.
• “Set It And Forget It” Mentality. Part of keeping a site relevant involves making sure the site is updated frequently in order to stay fresh and account for search engine algorithm changes. In the corporate world, inertia can set in, so outdated information may be left on the site for years, and changes to the website may happen infrequently or as part of an initiative where all the pages are updated at the same time. After awhile, search engines visit less frequently, and competitors who keep fresh websites get priority in the search engine rankings.

Naturally, there are quite a few other mistakes made when it comes to building websites, and most of those mistakes are made in the small business sector. However, search engines have gotten very good at spotting many common mistakes, and can usually figure out the relationship between pages on smaller sites. Larger sites, however, may be compounding their design mistakes, and may be fractionalizing the value that search engines apply to each of that site’s pages. If you have ever wondered why a cheap looking site with minimal SEO work is beating a billion dollar brand name in the search engines, you may want to consider how good of a job that the big company is doing with its optimization.