As a web designer, you give 110% of your creativity and efforts in each and every project that you pursue. Now imagine, no one or very few people get to see your work because the website you designed lacks the elements that make it SEO friendly.
SEO is very important for promoting and growing your brand. This is only because the top ranking websites on the search engines gets most clicks. Using SEO enables you to increase your website’s ranking in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and stay at the top.
However, SEO isn’t child’s play and some mistakes are bound to happen. But what if you already knew what things to keep on your checklist while designing your website. Wouldn’t that be great? Here’s a list of mistakes to avoid to make your web design SEO optimised:
- Increased load time of your web page
The loading time of your website impacts your ranking greatly. It has been officially stated by google that page load speed is one of the factors considered while calculating a page’s rank.
Some of the elements that affect your page’s speed are size of your media files, number of animations added to the various elements, plugins used, web host and even the user’s internet speed.
To speed up your website, you should consider compressing the media files and the response time of your server to around 200 ms.
- Large Images and Media Files
High resolution images increase the quality of your website but like almost everything, they also have a downside. These files are massive in size and can slow down your website’s speed. Tools such as ImageRecycle, Optimizilla and Kraken can help you compress these files.
- Missing H1 Tags
You can have a top notch website with all the attractive and best elements but the search engines wouldn’t even consider it as a candidate if it doesn’t include the ‘right’ elements.
One of these ‘right’ elements is the H1 tag. It tells the search engine about the contents of the page. But you should ensure that the content within these H1 Tags consists of descriptive keywords and phrases so that will help drive traffic to your page.
- Infinite Scroll
This feature allows a user to scroll down continuously while they wait for the data, images, pages, etc to load. Even though this feature is quite user friendly, what it’s not is SEO friendly.
Search engines wouldn’t detect the posts that are yet to load because by default they only crawl links. Thus, even though your page will have a lot of posts, only the ones loaded initially will be detected and not the ones loaded after scrolling down. You can follow the instructions mentioned on Google Webmaster blog to make your infinite scroll more SEO friendly.
- Pop-Ups
If you ask a user, pop-ups are one of the most annoying things on a website but it’s not only the users who are against these ads. Even search engines tend to sideline your site if it has a lot of these intrusive ads.
- Not Mobile-Friendly
According to research, a majority of online global traffic is generated through mobile devices so it is necessary for your website to have a responsive design. As of 2015, Google started penalizing websites that weren’t mobile friendly with very less online visibility.
- Thin Content Pages
Content is also an extremely important part of your website. You can have the most user friendly design but even then there are chances of a low google ranking if the content is irrelevant. Also, the content should not only be relevant but also original and of high quality. Failing to understand this can lead to significant SEO sufferers for your site.
There should be a minimum of 250 words on the page for it to be ranked well.
- Text in Images
Including images in your web design is not enough. You need to add descriptive text, for example, using the ALT attribute so that it makes them accessible to search engines and help your site be ranked.
- Including the ‘No-index’ tag
No-index tags prevent your page from being indexed by search engines. Forgetting to remove these tags from the site is one of the most common mistakes made by designers and thus resulting in a low SERP ranking.
- Broken Links
Broken server links prevent search engines from crawling correctly on your pages. This has an adverse effect on your Google rankings as search engines have a fixed crawl budget for each website and they cannot afford to waste it on broken links.
The next time you design a website or decide to get one designed, make sure to avoid these blunders and increase your SEO rankings. At Make My Website, our team of SEO experts and web designers work in sync to give you the best possible website. Get in touch with us @ info@makemywebsite.com.au/ 1300769302 or visit our website to avail our services. You can also visit our blog page to read more such informational blogs.
