Introduction
Are you looking to make the best impression on your online customers? Well, all you need to do is avoid these 6 Web Design Mistakes That Hurt Your SEO Prospects.
When it comes to creating the best website, SEO is everything. With good SEO, you are guaranteed of getting the highest traffic to your site. After all, only the high-ranking websites register the most clicks. Also, good SEO helps you beat the competition in the market to remain among the best-selling and most profitable businesses.
However, creating an SEO-optimized website is no mean feat. Even professionals and experts in SEO service in the UK make mistakes when designing Websites. Yet, these mistakes could cost you dearly, even hurt your SEO prospects and deny you the site clicks you need to grow your online business.
In this article, we discuss 6 Web Design Mistakes That Hurt Your SEO Prospects and how you can avoid them to create the best SEO-friendly website. Read on!
1. Not Making Your Page Accessible
Failing to make the page accessible is one of the major errors that people make when creating their web designs. According to the Search Engine Journal Report, indexation and site accessibility account for 21% of all the SEO mistakes done.
Therefore, to avoid any negative impact on your SEO, you must make your page accessible. You can achieve this by creating all-inclusive content, the type of content that appeals to every kind of reader.
Also, you would do well to omit features, such as iframes, and prioritize other features like alt text in the site images. Iframes not only contribute very little to your SEO but also lead to lower page speeds; hence, the need for omitting them. On the other hand, alt text makes it possible for site visitors to decipher the information depicted by the images, making it a necessary addition.
2. Providing Insufficient Content
A few years back, it was a common thing to find websites with limited content. However, gone are those days when short content was the trend; nowadays, most websites provide longer content with a minimum of 1000 words. Therefore, if your site and web pages rank highly in search engines, you also need to provide sufficient content for your readers.
However, this does not imply that you make every page of your website long. Yet, it would be good to ensure that 75% of your website pages contain longer content, at least 1000 words. As shown in a research study conducted by SERPIQ, the top-ranked page consists of at least 2,416 words, while the tenth-ranked page has about 2,032 words.
Therefore, to ensure that your pages also rank high, you need to provide long enough content. And most importantly, your content should address the topic and intent of the users. And it goes without saying that you will need to invest your time and attention to attain such in-depth content.
3. Optimizing Meta-Tags Improperly
Meta-tags are among the key things that give your website good SEO, especially if well-optimized. They are essential texts included in a webpage to explain to Google and other search engines what the main page contents are. Hence, unless you want to tread on a perilous SEO path, you need to avoid the web design mistake of not including well-optimized meta-tags in your website.
To optimize your meta-tags properly, ensure that your meta description contains at least 150-180 characters, while the meta title contains a maximum of 11 words. Also, for SEO-optimized content, make sure to include the focus keywords and other relevant keywords naturally throughout the content.
4. Failing to Link an About Us Page
To increase your SEO prospects, include a relevant headline on top of every webpage, as well as links to your Contact page and About Us. In order to aggregate content, Google crawlers usually search for specific generic terms when following links. Therefore, when you fail to link an about us page, Google will be unable to crawl through your web pages and aggregate content that can help your site rank higher.
5. Designing Exclusively for Smartphones or Desktops
Desktop sites (websites that are designed exclusively for desktop devices) take relatively long times to load on smartphones. This makes them inconveniencing for mobile phone users, in turn lowering their probability of being ranked high in search engines.
Similarly, webpages designed exclusively for desktops do not rank well on search engines when users search for the keywords on their laptops or desktops. This is why you are recommended to go for a responsive web design that can adapt to whichever device is being used, regardless of whether it is a mobile phone or a desktop.
Also, your web design should sense the overall resolution of the screen being used to view the page. Such adaptability is crucial for website owners launching multi-channel campaigns intended for users of different platforms.
6. Having No Way to Resolve 404 Errors
There are a few things as disappointing as seeing a 404 error while browsing. However, sometimes search engines run into such resource-not-found errors. In such cases, you should have a way of pointing these back to your website.
Better yet, you could come up with a creative strategy to provide links to your About Us page, homepage or other important pages. When you creatively link back to your homepage, Google and other search engines will be able to find something to link to despite the failure condition. More so, this could lead to the site visitors clicking on different links, providing you with additional traffic.
Conclusion
For SEO to show results, it might take some time, say weeks, or even months. This causes some people to be reluctant when it comes to employing good SEO practices, such that they carelessly make web design mistakes that hurt their SEO prospects. Yet, these mistakes impact your ranking negatively and minimize the traffic you get to your pages.
Therefore, you must avoid the 6 Web Design Mistakes That Hurt Your SEO. Better, consult with our SEO service in the UK, and we will help you create an SEO-optimized website for your online business.
