Common web design mistakes that hurt SEO
We all agree that the best websites should be designed for users and search engines, right? However, there are a number of very common mistakes that are detrimental to SEO , which are usually made when it comes to making a web design . Check to see if your site makes these common web design mistakes that can affect your website’s ranking in search engines.
Common web design mistakes:
Lack of h1 tag
Imagine walking into a website with a good background header image, a good chosen font, and a well-crafted color scheme. Navigation is incredible on this type of website, it is like walking through a beautiful garden.
Too bad that this page will not be found by search engines.
And you ask yourself, why? Very simple, often web designers and developers forget the essential and basic elements of SEO .
The most common crime in web positioning is the absence of an H1 tag , simply due to the fact that there is no place for it on the page. As an SEO Agency we have seen this error very often.
The H1 tag is one of the first items that search engines will see when they crawl a page. Having such a tag and including your target keyword will improve your chances of ranking higher in search engines.
To explain the importance of an H1 tag to website designers and owners, let’s do the following test. Go to a website and browse for five seconds, if you can easily tell what the website is about, user navigation is good. Generally, the easiest way to explain the website purpose is by using the H1 tag .
The weight of images and multimedia files
Pretty and elegant images make a website look amazing. However, great care must be taken with the size of those media files.
Including large images and heavy videos will make your website take longer to load, negatively impacting site speed , which can lead to lower search results. Well, Google rewards the pages that load faster.
But how do I know if I have heavy content on my site and how to fix it?
To do a quick analysis, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights that will tell you exactly the images on your page that for Google are too big.
This Google tool will tell you exactly which images to optimize , reducing their size and weight. In this way you will improve the loading speed of your website. Once you’ve identified these images, you resize, compress, and upload them back to your website.
Pop ups
Google recently warned websites to avoid using intrusive pop-ups and pop-ups.
The user experience , especially on mobile devices, it is very important to Google. When pop-ups appear before your visitors, preventing them from accessing the main content of your website, it can have a negative impact on your user experience and, therefore, on your SEO.
This could be a good time to re-evaluate your strategy, if you have such pop-ups, especially if you are seeing a decrease in organic traffic.
Text on images
Surprisingly, these common web design mistakes are widespread. Well instead of including the text on the image (adding a text layer) many web designers include the text on the image, which is equivalent to not including text at all. Well , search engines cannot see images as people see them .
For example, imagine that we have put a header image with the H1 as the title and a subtitle, included within the image. The search engine will not be able to read that text in the image , therefore it is as if it lacks H1.
Another reason why this design tactic should not be used is due to responsive mobile design. Since, on a mobile device, that text would not adapt to the size of the screen, but the entire image would adapt, and therefore the letters would appear very small, causing a bad user experience.
Infinite scroll
This is one of the most popular web design techniques that can really affect your website’s SEO performance when done incorrectly.
The infinite scroll loads the content as the user reaches the bottom of the page. If your pagination is not configured correctly, search engines will not be able to crawl your pages.
Let’s say you have infinite scroll enabled on your website that has 100 pages. If by default it only shows the 10 most recent articles, what will the search engines see? Since robots crawl websites through links , there is no way for them to access beyond the first 10 articles.
Thin Content
Products and services pages are the most important pages on your website. Some common web design mistakes related to thin content are:
- Not having service / product pages on the website. The absence of such pages on your website causes you to miss an opportunity to rank organically for your target keywords.
- Have a page of several products or services. The best SEO practice is to have a keyword for each page. In this way, it is clear to search engines what each page is about and to rank accordingly. Once you start listing multiple products or services on the same page, the search engine becomes confusing and your website can lose its rankings in the rankings.
- Little text on service / product pages. Once you have identified the product / service pages to include on your website, you should spend some time thinking about the text that will accompany each page. If you have descriptive content that explains to your visitors the benefits of buying from your store or hiring your services, there is a greater probability that visitors will end up converting.
Summary
Whether you are working on a new website or redesigning an existing one, you should not forget these critical elements of SEO. Abdul Rimaaz After all, what we want from a website is for everyone to be able to reach it.