A successful website is a lot more than a pretty interface. It is a site that loads quickly, boasts expert navigation, and is visible on search engines. In this article, we focus on the latter in particular. Read on to discover some of the common web design mistakes that could be hurting your SEO campaign.
- Thin content – The most important pages of your website are the service and product pages. But a lot of websites don’t even contain these pages, and those that do are often very thin in terms of content. When you do this, you don’t target your keywords effectively, and you miss out on an opportunity to organically rank your target keywords.
- Infinite scroll – Infinite scroll does not have to hurt your SEO campaign, but it can when it is not done correctly. This highlights the importance of working with a top quality web design company in Walthamstow. If you don’t, the pagination will not be set up correctly, and this will mean that search engines cannot crawl your pages.
- Text in images – This is another mistake that is littered all over the Internet. A lot of amateur web designers simply include text into an image, instead of placing a text layer over the top of it. Why is this a problem? Well, search engines cannot see images in the same way that we can. They can’t read text that is placed on the image and, therefore, it is like you have not included any text at all. This is why it is important to use a text layer, as Google will be able to read this.
- Pop-ups – One quality that is considered when determining your search engine ranking is user experience. And, one thing that harms user experience is an endless stream of pop-ups and intrusive interstitials. If a pop-up appears on your website before a user is able to see any of the content, this can hurt your UX, which in turn has a negative impact on your SEO. This is especially the case when it comes to viewing your website on mobile devices.
- Large media files and images – There is no denying that your website can look amazing when beautiful imagery is incorporated. Nonetheless, you do need to be very careful with the size of your media files. Large videos and images can cause your site to load a lot slower, which can result in a lower ranking. Luckily, an experienced web design company in Walthamstow will be able to draw on a number of tools to determine the load speed of your website and whether tweaks need to be made to improve it.
- Missing H1 tags – Last but not least, missing H1 tags can be particularly damaging, especially if you don’t have any H1 tags on your homepage. H1 tags inform search engines what your website is about. If you don’t have this tag, a search engine will struggle to rank your site, as they won’t know how it benefits searchers. It is also important to include your main keyword in the H1.