You’ve followed all the guidelines and SEO strategies for your website. The site has unique, relevant content and excellent keywords. In spite of all this, your site isn’t getting any visitors. What went wrong? Most likely, your site has too many web design mistakes which can prevent visitors and a high rank on search engines. A good web design doesn’t just mean a flashy, attractive website but a design that is easy for visitors to use and navigate. A properly designed website will attract new clients and potential customers to your website every day. This, in turn, will give your site a higher ranking and more visibility online. Here are 5 web design mistakes that you must avoid as they can damage your SEO in the long run:
Cramming your homepage with too many elements:
Does your website have too many images, animations or social media icons? Elaborate graphics, excessive animations and needless widgets will lead to a slow loading time for your site. This won’t just annoy visitors and make them leave your site but it can also affect your site’s search engine ranking factor. Google even labels slow sites on mobile devices. To fix this problem, you have to get rid of anything that slows down your website. Start off by checking your site’s speed on Pingdom speed test tool. Also, clean up your site’s code by deleting any empty HTML tags. This can make a huge difference to your website’s loading speed.
Useless and obtrusive pop-up ads:
Pop up ads are generally irrelevant and redundant. They aren’t indexed by search engines. Most designers don’t even include them. Users hit the close button without reading them. Yes, they are annoying. But pop up ads can greatly increase email subscriptions for your site. If you want to include pop-up ads in your website’s design, use them sparingly and make sure they are relevant. Stay away from loud, flashy and brightly colored pop-ups. Keep the design simple and elegant and make sure they don’t interfere with the user’s experience on your website. Finally, make sure they don’t appear more than once during a session.
Faulty navigation and website structure:
A site will have poor navigation if you place more importance on the design instead of user experience. To have a site with good navigation, you should first consider what is necessary for users. You should also remember that if visitors don’t like the navigation, they will immediately leave your site and go back to search results. This is a hallmark of poor user experience and is terrible for SEO. Also, the structure of the website needs to be clean. A faulty website structure will be harder for Google’s algorithms to crawl through, lead to broken links and will eventually become harder for you to identify lost google rankings.
Lack of image optimization:
Images are important for any website. Users just love pictures and graphics and prefer sites with images. This is why images play a major role in SEO and site rankings. You must include images in your website’s design in the best way possible to attract users. Simply put, you will have to optimize images for your site. To do this, make sure you use fitting and relevant images that match the text or subject matter. Stock photos by Dreamstime, for example, give you quality options from a variety of categories. Also, pick the right name for the images and avoid bland, generic file names. Reduce the file size to make sure that the picture loads faster. Together with other factors, optimizing images will drastically improve user experience on your site.
Including vital information on images instead of putting them in text:
Text has always been the most user-friendly form of transmitting information when compared to images, videos or podcasts. Also, search engine spiders actively search for keywords in visible locations. This is why, important information such as titles, meta descriptions and relevant content shouldn’t be displayed in images. Most search engine crawlers can’t recognize text placed in images. This, in turn, will ruin the SEO of your site and make it less visible on search engine results.
Avoiding these common website design mistakes will attract new users to your site by improving user experience. A good design will automatically generate plenty of traffic for the website by attracting the more visitors and giving the website a high ranking on search engines. These tips will help you create a flawless design for your site, whether you are designing a new site or giving an old one a makeover. In short, a good web design goes hand in hand with SEO and will take your website a long way.
