Common Web Design Mistakes That Hurt SEO
If you are a business owner or have your own site, you would want your website to impress. When you express your ideas that would be brought to life by the web designer, he or she wouldn’t want any creative boundaries. That’s fair given that you’d want your website to linger on the minds of people who visit your site, which you hope in turn will increase sales/bottom-line.
The primary motive behind using web design is to give the visitors a great user experience, increase website traffic and revenues, which would mean showing up on the search pages of Google. To rank higher on search engines, your website will need to be SEO friendly too.
And to get the desired results web design and SEO will need to work in harmony. Can art and technology work together to get you what you want, or is it just a pipe dream?
If you give your web designer a free hand without keeping tabs on the SEO technicalities, it can spell disaster. Your website might look great, but it might turn out slow and finding things on your site might be a challenge.
This will adversely affect your SEO and SERP. So, no matter how great your website looks, you’ll not be able to generate any traffic.
The issue becomes all the more difficult if you aren’t familiar with SEO and web design. To help you we have put together a list of X common web design mistakes that you should avoid, or they could hurt your SEO.
Do’s and Don’ts for Images: For your website to look beautiful, you need images. But more often than not for the sake of more than required quality designers forget to keep a balance between size and clarity. Increased image size adds to the size of the page and ends up increasing your page loading time.
Imagine while planning your vacation you search for your dream location and you click on a website to look at the images. The page starts loading, and it takes more than 15 seconds to load the images half-way. Are you going to wait or are you going to look for another website?
If you don’t have your website images optimized, your site could suffer the same fate.
Image Optimization Tips:
- Include information in Alt Tags: You’ve probably read it before. But what does it mean? There’s no doubt search engines are increasingly becoming smarter. But, judging whether an image is beautiful, or determining the context will still take search engines some more time to figure out. Till then you’ll need to let search engine bots know what your image is about, that’s where Alt Tag’s come into play. Be descriptive in the alt tags of your website images. In addition, you should also pay attention to your title and heading tags, links, anchor text and also host all your images.
- No Contact Information in Images: You might be hurting your own chances of being found by embedding business addresses, phone numbers, and location in images. As the search engine can’t read info off of images, you’re the one who’ll be losing out as the search bots won’t be able to pick up the vital info.
Pop-up’s are going down in 2017 and beyond: Google has already issued warnings to websites that have pop-ups. If you stop and think for a minute, don’t you get frustrated if there are pop-ups all over the page when you visit a website for information?
It’s a major hindrance to good UX, and Google is going to come down hard in the years to come if people don’t get rid of pop-up’s on their websites.
If you have Windows 7 or Windows 8, here is a link to a webiste that will explain step by step, how to get rid of your pop up problem.
Mobile Isn’t Secondary: The number of users browsing on mobile devices is soon going to be more than the ones using PCs. So how your website looks on a mobile device can’t be an afterthought anymore. Google decided to penalize websites without a mobile-friendly site with an algorithm update in 2015. If you haven’t already done it you can do in 3 ways. Create a responsive site, dynamic serving or separate URLs.
You can test if your website is mobile friendly with Google’s webmaster tools and plenty of other free tools available online. If you aren’t too comfortable with web design you can do it yourself with various responsive themes available for CMS based solutions.
Results Driven Marketing are the experts in “Turning Clicks Into Clients”! If you’re looking to get found by more people who are looking for your services give us a call at 215-393-8700. Our expertise in digital marketing and web design services can help you get the results you want.
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