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SEO advantages and disadvantages probably exist on every site. Let’s analyse all advantages first. The main page is optimised very well. This causes very good positions in Google for the term ‘overseas schools’. How do I know? I used the keyword cloud first for my analysis. You can easily see that the main page avoids keyword stuffing, but the importance goes to the most important words. This fact is caused by proper use of sentences and wording. Yes, even the wording can result in better rankings. The term ‘overseas schools’ is used in the beginning of the sentences as well as in the middle parts and at the end. An administrator gave this phrase great importance by using bold tags beside an h1 tag, which is very important for the on-site optimisation.

The next advantage is a presence of links to the main page from every deeper page. Please note, that I will analyse links more in the next part of this overview, because there are many disadvantages caused by links. External links give quality anchor text, which is also the reason why this site is ranked well in Google. Nowadays, any site can’t get top rankings without quality links with quality anchor text. Beside quality anchor text, we can see that overseas schools database has enough incoming links. I’d recommend raising this number from about 50 to about 150-200. It would mean guaranteed 1-st place on Google, MSN, Yahoo and maybe Overture for the phrase ‘overseas schools’. The pagerank calculator says that this site is going to get PR3 in the future. Anyway, I would focus on getting as many incoming links as possible, because PR4+ is better than PR3.

As I’m trying to find other advantages, I’m able to find only the site access speed. It is loaded quickly on every type of internet connection.

Now, to analyse all disadvantages. The first disadvantage relates to the use of image links on the page. Images aren’t bad if they use proper alt attributes. As you can see, this site doesn’t use proper alt attributes. Also, title attributes are missing too.

Besides the wrong use of links, there is another very weak spot caused by using the PHPSESSID variable. I opened the pages on this site and after a while this variable disappeared from the URL’s. I don’t understand it, but it is a very unfortunate solution. Maybe you’ve heard many times something like ‘Don’t use PHPSESSID on your sites’, but did anyone tell you why is it bad? Maybe you’re new to this, so let’s go through it from the beginning. The PHPSESSID variable is generated randomly for every page each time it’s open. This variable is stored beside other cookies, even if it isn’t a cookie in its basis. Now, imagine you’re a crawler and you visit some site with this variable in the URL’s. OK, let’s follow all links, index them and store them. After some time, you come back to this site in order to check new content, links and so. But what happen when you open the main page of a site like this? You will find another PHPSESSID values! What does it mean? For a crawler, these pages are new! But what’s more, the old pages are indexed too. For example, on most of the pages the content stays the same, so the most of your pages will be considered using the same content and you could get a penalty. Of course, after some time the old pages will be removed from the index, because any link pointing to them will not exist (because of another values of PHPSESSID). So it’s like a never ending circle. A crawler finds links, it follows them, then it finds another links, removes the old ones from the index and so. Unlike PHPSESSID based sites, an ordinary pages with dynamic links are usually stable and they probably exist for a lifetime.

Analysing the links, you will find another weak spot; The absence of the directory structure and dynamically generated content via index.php. This kind of solution is good for a programmer, but it isn’t good for any crawler.

Another disadvantage of this site is invalid source code. Using the old HTML 4.01 Transitional code could be good enough if was used properly. Really fatal errors say that this site wasn’t designed for SEO purposes. Valid source code is very friendly not only for a human visitor sitting in front of a PC, but it is very good for other human visitors, who use a PDA or mobile devices. Simply press SHIFT F11 on Opera, so you will see how any site looks under these devices. But even if PDA devices are important, we need to focus on the importance for SEO. Any valid source code is easy to interpret for all search engines. Using valid source code is why crawlers are able to follow all links easily and immediately after they’re found. I’ve seen sites with invalid URL’s and if human visitors are unable to click them and follow them easily, any crawler won’t able to interpret them properly. Fortunately, osid.co.uk is readable. However, I’d suggest everyone should avoid this way of making the source code messed up.

Well, even if this site has numerous disadvantages, it is ranked well because of the links and the on-site optimisation. My overall rating is 5/10 (2/10 for the on-site SEO + 8/10 for the off-site SEO).