People use Google as the primary tool of research. For this reason, SEO is one of the most critical elements of your digital marketing strategy. Without effective optimisation, your website won’t have a proper online presence.
Your website is the most essential element of any SEO campaign management, as it’s where all the optimisation work is done. Regardless of how important SEO is, many companies and organizations still make common web design mistakes that can harm the progress of their SEO campaigns.
With that said, here are five design errors to avoid when you’re planning to launch an SEO campaign:
1. Placing keywords in image files and not the alt text field
This is a common issue for many sites that convey their messages through graphs and infographics, as they will forego putting keywords in the text itself. While this may not be a problem for users, it’s a problem for Google. Google’s algorithm can read the text in images, but they’re not nearly as effective as when it’s written out for them. This will interfere with its crawling mechanism, which will result in your website being penalised.
2. Failing to establish website structure or page hierarchy
You need to make sure that you prioritise pages that will be useful to users. Google’s algorithm will also want to ensure that people don’t get confused about where to find the pages they’re looking for, so it’s crucial for you to establish the correct website structure.
3. Neglecting to optimise image files
One thing that not too many people know about is that images can be optimised to support your overall ranking. Crawlers don’t perceive images as we do, they will interpret them as a code. If the code is incomprehensible to them, they won’t know what to do with the information.
Therefore, by changing the name from “screenshoNeglectingt(1).png” to “dog_with_bone”, you will be making the photo more readable for Google. If you help Google to have an easier time reading your site, it will prioritise you over the sites that don’t. For this reason, make sure you have a title and alt text for every image you put on your site.
4. Overlooking the importance of mobile-optimisation
People are browsing with their mobile devices more than ever, so it’s important that you mobile-optimise every element of your website. Not only does this help to promote the ranking of your site on mobile searches, but it also helps on desktop searches.
Google prioritises the user experience over everything else, which is why they want to make sure that everyone has the best browsing experience on the top sites that they suggest. If your site doesn’t support mobile access, it will affect your traffic, retention time and bounce rate, which will subsequently reduce your rankings.
While it’s difficult to optimise your site for every mobile device and operating system, responsive design is a web design element that will automatically adjust your website to fit any screen and display. Instead of having to manually implement changes for every platform, you can have your site resized automatically based on the device’s screen.
5. Forgetting to minimise the load time
The load time is the most crucial part of UX design, it’s the first thing that the user will come across as soon as they click on the link. If your load time is longer than 3 seconds, your bounce rate will increase considerably for every subsequent second the site takes to load. Therefore, you want to make sure that you optimise the site speed along with the interface to allow for the best browsing experience.
One of the best ways to cut down the loading time is by compressing file sizes. These elements have a significant effect on the load time, as it will take much longer for them to load.
If you’re looking for an organic SEO agency in Totnes, Devon. Dot Media is here to help!
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