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When designing your website there are three major design elements that you should stay away from in order as they can sabotage even your best efforts at search engine optimization. These three elements to avoid are flash animation, javascript and HTML coding mistakes.
First of all, search engines perceive sites with flash as being "empty spaces." Rather than checking out the content, most search engines just discard the URL. God knows how many people's sites have been rejected because a spider inside a search engine denoted their flash as blank space!
If you are using Javascript or CSS in your pages, you probably stuck it at the top of your pages. Remember that search engines tend to rate what they find at the top of pages a bit higher so avoid anything that a search engine considers to be fluff -- and that would be pages and pages of Java enabled script. A better way to do things is put the Javascript (or CSS) in a separate file, and include it into your pages with a single tag. To avoid this kind of headache however, I advise that you avoid using java script at all. The worst thing that can happen is that a search engine spider will read the javascript as a malfunctioning page. It happens all the time!
It is also crucial to make sure your HTML is correct. Just because your page is displaying nicely does NOT mean that the code itself doesn't contain errors. Search engines read HTML not what shows up on you pretty pages. The more perfect your HTML code is, the more likely a search engine is to rank it higher. This is why it might be a practical part of an SEO strategy to hire an expert to clean up your code if it is all messed up.
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