Search Engine Optimization is important for promoting and growing your brand because only the top-ranking websites on search engines get the majority of clicks. Implementing effective SEO techniques or outsourcing website SEO services to expert professionals enables you to boost your website’s ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and stay at the top.
While designing the website, it is essential to be aware of the most common web design mistakes, how they can affect your website’s SEO and how to avoid them as committing these mistakes can cost you dearly.
We’ll take you through a few common web design mistakes that can potentially hurt your SEO.
- Ineffective image naming, URL, and page
Failing to name your images properly (including image file names as well as the alt text), URLs, and page meta titles (which appear in browser windows) with proper keywords is a common mistake. But this doesn’t mean stuffing a lot of keywords into your alt tags. This outdated (and questionable) practice can hurt your rankings.
Instead,
- Use alt tags to provide simple and clear explanations about your image and page content.
- Do not leave the names of your images, pages, and URLs up to your developer or the person who uploads the content, or worse, let them be generated by your CMS.
- Create a focused plan for page naming which addresses your page content and website keywords. The URLs, titles and alt tags for every page should be distinct and reflect that page’s keywords and topics.
All in all, what matters is relevance for effective SEO. Describe and name the page content in a meaningful way that answers the questions of your audience.
- Poor website navigation
Have you ever visited a website where you had no clue what to do next? You must’ve left that website really soon and started looking out for a website that offers similar products/services.
But you wouldn’t want your own visitors to do the same, right? Instead, you would want them to instantly know exactly what to do, such that they stay longer on your website. Plus, you’d want the web crawlers to understand your website. Both of these things can be achieved by prioritizing internal linking between your pages, helping you rank higher on SERPs.
- Large image and media files
It is common to feel tempted to pack your website with beautiful graphics and images. But an important thing to know here is that large media files and images can slow down your website, hampering your search rankings.
To ensure this doesn’t happen, you can run your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights Test.
If they are too large, you can either compress or resize them and re-upload them on your website.
- Disruptive pop-ups
When used correctly, pop-ups can easily convert up to 1,375{0b417d4c93234aef6039964fbe578f7ae638e3f3c166da2ce2150373ba613e36} more email subscribers.
However, the problem emerges when pop-ups interrupt and annoy your visitors.
According to Google, it’ll be challenging for websites with annoying pop-ups to rank high on SERPs. The solution to this is to build pop-ups that your audience will love. Though they may never love them, you should at least build high-converting and interesting pop-ups that won’t annoy them.
For example, you can time a pop-up to appear once a visitor has spent a few seconds on your website or maybe, once they have scrolled halfway down your page.
Conclusion
Once you have already spent a lot of time designing your website and you know visitors will find it attractive, your next step should be to ensure people actually find it on Google. This can be done by optimizing your website for search engines.
However, if you are not getting the expected results from your SEO efforts, look for potential SEO mistakes, consider consulting experts, and ensure your website is hosted on high-performing and best WooCommerce Hosting as hosting also plays a crucial role in making the website rank higher.
Fixing these issues should help you rise on SERPs.
