Web Design Mistakes That Are Hurting Your SEO

SEO and web design go hand-in-hand. Web design is a lot more than creating a pretty website that looks impressive on the eye. SEO is a lot more than incorporating a few keywords and links into content. So, if you are struggling to make moves on Google, it could be because of a mistake you are making with regards to the design of your website. Let’s take a look at some of the website errors that have a negative impact on SEO in further detail…

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You haven’t optimised your images for search engine spiders – A lot of amateur website designers make the mistake of incorporating text within an image, rather than adding a text layer over the top. It’s important to recognise that search engine spiders cannot view websites in the same way that we do. If you do not add a text layer, it will be like the text isn’t even there. By having ALT text included, you ensure that the spiders can understand the images on your website and, therefore, provide accurate details for their search engine users.

Navigational issues – There are many reasons why your website needs to boast seamless navigation. The most obvious being the fact that it makes the user experience more enjoyable and will encourage users to take action, whether that means making a sale or signing up to your newsletter. What a lot of business owners do not realise is that navigation also impacts SEO. If your fonts clash or you have adverts obstructing your menu, your ranking will suffer. After all, Google and the other major search engines rank websites based on user experience. Plus, the high bounce rate you are likely to have certainly won’t help.

Your website takes a long time to load – Again, this comes down to user experience. If your website has a slow page speed, user experience suffers, and your ranking goes down as a consequence. But, how do you know if your website is too slow? The best thing to do is have a website audit. You can find information about audits at the Darren Langley web designer website. This is something a lot of web designers offer, and they usually carry it out free of charge. It enables you to deduce load speed and other factors that will impact user experience and, therefore, SEO. You can see where you are going wrong.

Failing to make sure the robots.txt file is correct – This is a simple text file that is put onto your web server, which tells Googlebot and other web crawlers whether they can access a file or not. Your ranking can suffer significantly if you do not use this text file correctly. You can find more information about the impact of robots.txt on SEO by viewing one of our previous blog posts. In a nutshell, if you don’t use this file correctly, you are going to prohibit the Googlebot from visiting some of your main web pages.

So there you have it; four major web design issues that could be hurting your SEO ranking. If any of these sound familiar, you will need to address them if you want to move up the search engine result pages.