What is the best way to keep users exploring the website that you created? As a web designer, you should know this.
Make it appealing using a creative and elaborate design with enticing eye-opening themes and imagery.
However, during this process, there is one thing that you need to keep in mind; websites are built for both users and search engines.
Why?
For online users to be able to navigate and experience your amazing website, they need to be able to find it. This is where SEO efforts come in, and unfortunately, more designers than not tend to make common mistakes that affect your SEO efforts in a negative way.
To assist you, we have compiled 6 common mistakes which need to be avoided at all costs:
1. Missing H1 Tags.
H1 tags, also known as ‘heading 1 tags’ are debatably the most important facet of SEO efforts when designing a website.
Why? This is because search engine crawlers, which scan your website to rank it and compare it to other websites, will use the H1 tags to figure out what the page they are crawling is all about.
To come up with the most effective H1 tag to aid your SEO efforts, it should contain the target keyword that you are attempting to rank for.
2. Infinite Scroll
If you haven’t heard of infinite scroll, it is essentially the ability for the page that an online user is visiting to load more and more information as the user scrolls down the page.
It is an extremely popular website technique. However, if done incorrectly, the SEO performance of your website will be hurt severely.
How? Let’s give you an example:
On your website, your ‘blog’ page has around 50 blogs that have been published on it, and online users are able to view all of these blogs as long as they keep scrolling down your page. Convenient right? However, there is a downfall. By default, the settings that are implemented during the design of your website only allows 10 blogs to be shown per page, which will result in the search engine crawlers only registering these 10 blogs. This is because they are not programmed to ‘scroll crawl’ infinite scrolling pages.
There is a solution to making scroll pages search-friendly. All you need to do is follow the instructions provided by the Google Webmaster Blog.
3. Text-In-Images
When looking at websites you see text all over the background images on the site. So, you may be asking why it’s a mistake that should be avoided.
Let us tell you.
To begin, the text that you see on websites has been added in one of two ways:
- As a text layer over an image.
- Into the image itself.
Adding text into an image causes an abundance of problems when it comes to your SEO efforts. This is because search engines do not have the ability to ‘view’ images like people can. As a result, they are unable to read the text that has been included in the image like people can.
What am I getting at?
If you have added the text into an image on your website, you might as well not have it there at all. You will not be ranking for it.
To avoid this SEO problem, use one of the solutions that are offered by The Art Of Web.
4. Mobile Unfriendly
According to Search Engine Watch, 67% of consumers are more likely to buy products on websites that are mobile friendly.
Why is this significant information?
It tells us that having a mobile-friendly website is one of the most important facets of successfully generating leads and making sales. Unfortunately, many web designers do not realise the significance of having a mobile-friendly website.
To help you, we recommend using the following Webmaster tools to pass the mobile-friendly test:
- Mobile Optimisation.
- Robots Testing Tool.
- Page Speed.
5. Large Media Files
When designing a website, the most beautiful and eye-capturing images are going to be more effective than dull or no images at all. However, there is one major factor that needs to be considered when uploading images to your website.
The size of them.
Large images that have a very high-resolution are wonderful to look at, but if they don’t load quick enough, no one will see them.
What do I mean by this? Large images take much longer to load than smaller images on a website, which affects your site speed. Unfortunately, there are two negative outcomes to this problem:
- Users will exit your website before the page loads because they do not want to wait around for it to load.
- Google will drop your ranking because of your site speed being lower than the optimal speed.
To help you overcome this issue, you will need to test your site speed as well as compress any media files that are not of optimal size.
To do so, we recommend the following tools:
- Google Page Speed Insights (Page Speed Test).
- GT Metrix (Website Speed Test).
- Compress PNG Online (Compress Media File).
- Compress JPEG Online (Compress Media File).
6. Thin Content
To begin, you need to ask yourself which pages on your website are the most important.
Why? This is because those are the pages that you will prioritise when it comes to ranking on search engines.
The higher your website is ranking, the more business you will receive. That’s just fact.
There are common mistakes that are made regarding thin content:
- The absence of product or service pages on your website, which is a missed opportunity to organically rank highly for the keywords that you have chosen to rank for.
- Multiple products and/or services being listed on a single website page, which results in poor rankings. This is because it confuses search engines as to which keyword you are wanting to rank for on the page.
- Having very little text on the page itself. Search engines are programmed to rank pages with an abundance of informative content more highly than pages that have little or irrelevant content on the page.
We sound like experts, don’t we?
Well, that’s because we are. What’s more, we’re here to help you. Our team of web designers can guarantee ranking results during their design and development as well as website maintenance that will keep you ahead of any changes that search engines seem to spring businesses websites.
Looking for more information? Head over to our website, we have exactly what you need.
