Avoid These Website Design Mistakes And Improve Your SEO

When you invested in your website, whether you invested a lot or a little, there were two things that you no doubt had in mind. First, you wanted your website to look great and really show off what you do. Second, you wanted your website to start showing up at the top of search engine results.

Having a site that looks great is largely down to your web designers. Web designers are the artists of the internet. They take immense pride in creating unique sites for their clients but they detest compromising style and elegance for the sake of marketing needs. (OK, maybe not all of them but a lot of web designers). When having a website design, it is vital that your brief for your designer includes your marketing and SEO needs from the very start.

Websites are more than a window into your business; they are a vital marketing commodity that requires forethought and regular upkeep. Here are some of the most common website design issues that create havoc for SEO.

Your Website Isn’t Mobile Friendly

Year on year, the volume of traffic to websites from mobile phones is increasing. More than half of web traffic comes from smartphones. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly already, you might find that you have a higher than average bounce rate.

Google knows that users want sites they can view and navigate on their phones and that is why having a mobile-friendly site is one of the key requirements for SEO. A site that is not mobile-friendly will be penalized by search engines and pushed further and further down search results.

You Don’t Use Text Content Properly

There are two very common mistakes used on websites and both relate to images vs text. These are having a site that is image focused only and putting text inside images. Simply put, this means that your site can not be understood by search engine bots. When a search engine crawls your site it is looking for information that helps it understands where to rank your site in search results. However, these bots cannot understand images. They only understand text and HTML.

To better optimize your site, ensure that you are using H1 tags to say what the page is about and update your Meta descriptions with original text. For businesses or sites that are or want to be image focused, you need to compromise. Give every image a text description and ensure that you name your images with SEO in mind.

You’ve Overlooked Website Navigation

This one comes straight from the horse’s mouth (the horse here is Google Webmaster Guidelines) – navigation on your website should use text based static links.  There is a trend of using images in site navigation. Sure, it can look amazing but it will prevent your site from doing well in search results. “Navigation is a bugbear of designers the world over. There are ways that website navigation can look much better than the standard text,” says Javier Abal a web designer at DraftBeyond and Last Minute Writing. “I look forward to the day when search engine bots understand visuals better.”

Your Site Is Slow

A high bounce rate can be a key indicator of site speed. Web users are not patient people and they want to access your website on their terms. Mobify found that 57% of users will abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

“Search for ‘page speed insights’ online to test your site with Google’s developer tool. If your site is in the red or yellow speed brackets then there are a number of factors that could be slowing it down,” says Caroline Sweeny an SEO blogger at Writinity and Researchpapersuk. A web page that has a lot of different elements such as images and stylesheets requires more effort from Google. Simple page designs load quicker. Another factor could be the server, talk to your website host, and don’t be afraid to move if they are holding you back.

You Don’t Maintain Content

The thing about investing in a website is we tend to think the job is complete once the site goes live. In truth, a website needs regular content maintenance to prevent it from stagnating.

Audit your site each year to decide which areas could be refreshed and to make a content plan that is manageable for your resources. Your plan should ideally include up to 3-4 new blog posts each week, quarterly giveaways for lead capture, and culling of any dead or outdated content. As well as updating your blog, keep our facts up to date. If anything changes in your business, like the way you provide your services or your team members, change it straight away.

Ashley Halsey is a marketing writer at Dissertation Writing Services UK and GumEssays.com. Ashley helps local businesses improve their online brands and regularly speaks at business conventions.