In today’s day and age, websites should be designed for both users and search engines because each plays a huge role for the other. This means that you shouldn’t have to sacrifice the “form” over the “function” or vice versa, but ironically many web designers tend to still do this.
We’d recommend checking your site to make sure your beautifully designed website isn’t affecting your ability to rank high in search engines.
Missing SEO Elements On Your Webpages (Like H1 Tags)
Many website designers and developers tend to forget about essential SEO elements and this is often seen happening on the homepage because “there isn’t a place for it on the page.” An example of key SEO elements left by the wayside including H1 tags, H2 Tags, H3 tags, etc.
For reference, the H1 tag is one of the key elements that search engine crawlers take a look at to determine what the content of that page is all about. You can imagine that having this tag and including your target keyword(s) will help improve your chances of ranking higher significantly.
A good example of a website that tackles this well is Sprout Social.
Sprout Social tends to do an excellent job with these key elements on their homepage by including good use of tags and a call-to-action that stands out and is… actionable. To be more specific, the company has a strong, non-branded H1 tag that gets straight to the point. The H1 tag state the following: “Schedule. Publish. Analyze” and the tag is placed front and center while there is good use of H3 tags as well: The H3 tag says the following: “Trusted by agencies, relied on by businesses,” and offers a clear call to action “Start Your Free Trial” that stands out with the bright green font color on an otherwise dark background.
If you’re interested in testing out the effectiveness of a website’s user experience, while benefitting from the proper use of various SEO elements including H1 tags – try the five-second test, which is a great rule of thumb. According to the five-second test, if someone using your site can tell you what the web page is about after looking at it for only five seconds, the user experience is great and the job is likely well-done!
The Use of Large Media Files Like Images and Videos
We all know that using the right imagery can help bring a website together, but you definitely need to be careful with the size of your media files. If you include large images and videos on your website, it can negatively impact your site speed, which may result in lower rankings.
This isn’t exactly new information but Google rewards pages that load quickly as this provides a better user experience. Let’s be real, users don’t like to wait for pages to load for a long time and Google will penalize those that do, as they want to create the best experience for their users.
So how exactly do you know if your website has large media files and how can you go about fixing it?
You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool to help you determine what images Google thinks are too large on a certain webpage. Alternatively, you can also use a tool like Screaming Frog to identify large images and media files across your website. Once you have a list of media content that falls under the category of being too large, you can resize and/or compress them and re-upload them to your website.
Other things to keep in mind when trying to improve your page speed is to consider the following:
Without activating page caching, you’re basically asking the server to load your page every time a visitor requests it from scratch. By using page cache, you can send the webpage to your user immediately. The only downside here is that pages that require authentication can’t be cached and if you made some changes to one of your webpages, you’ll need to refresh your cache or wait for it to expire before the changes show up.
If you hire a cheap or inexperienced developer, there is a great chance that your site is built with messy and disorganized code. Here are some big offenders that lead to a higher page load time according to Lara Swanson:
If you feel your code may not clean as it can be, here are some resources that may be useful to you:
The Use of Text in Images
We still don’t get why this is a recurring issue and surprisingly it’s been an issue for quite some time. Instead of putting a text layer over an image, many website designers tend to just include text into an image.
So why exactly is doing this such a bad thing?
The biggest reason is because search engine crawlers can’t “see” images the same way people can. This results in the search engine being able unable to “read” the text that is on the image, which means it’s equivalent to having no text at all.
[irp]
Most website designers who make this mistake replace text headers with images, as they feel it makes the content pop and look amazing. For search engines it’s a useful on-page element that helps them understand the purpose of your content. To be more specific, it accounts for a 15.04% chunk of Google’s Ranking Algorithm.
One of the other reasons why this tactic is subpar is because it isn’t responsive! On a mobile device, the text and the button are going to appear very small, which causes a poor user experience. Google’s emphasis on mobile-friendliness will also be a sore spot for you if this tactic is used.
Not Optimizing Your Media with SEO
Search engine crawlers tend to crawl media content by looking for certain information in prominent locations. Elements such as images, flash files, and java applets are typically ignored by search engines, instead search engine crawlers are only able to:
According to Roman Bębenista, “websites well-optimized for graphics, the number of visits resulting from image search may vary from 20 to even 60% of all visits from Google.”
Some quick tips to help you optimize the images on your website:
If you’re interested in learning about optimizing your images more in depth, watch Peter Linsley’s presentation on Google Image Search:
Just like with images, Google expects you to provide relevant mark up information for your videos as well, via the use of Schema markup. The relevance of your video is determined by a series of factors such as the video transcript, the text that surrounds the video, the video caption and the meta information that you share. That being said, the quality of the content in your videos is what helps to drive engagement and build a loyal audience, which in the end is what will ultimately affect your rankings.
On a separate note, we recommend not configuring video pages with complex JavaScript, Flash, and hash tags as this would not surface correctly in video search since Google can’t provide a unique URL to users in this scenario.
Serving Intrusive Popups
Google recently warned webmasters to avoid using intrusive interstitials and popups. The primary reason was because of poor user experience on mobile devices. Essentially when users are faced with popups before they can access the main content on a website, it can negatively impact their user experience and therefore your SEO.
The ads were getting so bad that Chrome even started to block them from appearing by default.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t consider the use of popups at all. Google doesn’t penalize non-intrusive interstitials. Popups for the use of anything you’re legally required to display to restrict content or keep your users informed like age verification or cookie use are allowed. Other popups such as banner ads, slide-ins, inlines and tabs, that take a reasonable portion of the screen are also OK as long as they are easy to remove. A reasonable portion of the screen consists of anything that takes up 15% or less of the screen.
There are several good cases and uses of popups such as those used by Entrepreneur.com, which found a 162% increase in sales by serving limited time offers in pop-ups to targeted visitors. Another success story is that of Webmeup which received 95% of its subscribers from popups in its first several months.
If you’re considering going this route, make sure that the popup is related to the content and design it with a nice overlay. Any coupon code or enticing copywriting can make the popup an effective one. Here are some things to keep in mind:
Thin Content
Pages that discuss your product(s) or service(s) tend to be the most important pages on the website. The higher the rankings you can get for these pages for your target keywords, the more traffic and ultimately business you will drive – it’s usually that simple. Common mistakes related to thin content include the following:
Improper Use of Infinite Scroll
Infinite scroll is a popular web design technique that can weaken your SEO performance when not done correctly and unfortunately, many developers who implement this technique tend to do so incorrectly.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with infinite scroll, it essentially loads more content as the user gets to the bottom of the page. If your pagination isn’t setup correctly than search engines won’t be able to crawl the necessary content on your site. To give you an example of this, let’s say you have fifty pages worth of blog content and you show ten blogs per page by default. The search engine robots will only see the ten most recent posts. Since the robots only crawl via links, there is no way for them to know there is more content on the page beyond the most recent ten articles.
If you really feel that infinite scroll is the way you want to go on your website, there is some good news. You can make the infinite scroll pages search-friendly by following the instructions on Google’s Webmaster Blog. By doing this, you won’t have to compromise between your design preferences and SEO.
Conclusion
The person/people working on your website design, development, and SEO need to coordinate with one another and make sure that they are creating a seamless user experience while still achieving business goals.
We’ve outlined some of the common mistakes that are often made by both small and large companies alike with some actionable items for each. Make sure you stay on top of best practices for your website, which should open up the opportunity for you to rank for the keywords you want to be ranking for!
Have you found any of the above mistakes on your website? Do you have any other critical SEO-hurting design or development issues in mind?
I like to call myself the 'cool guy' in the office, even though all of my work is virtual. If internet marketing is the jam of business these days, I am the nutella.
In today’s day and age, websites should be designed for both users and search engines because each plays a huge role for the other. This means that you shouldn’t have to sacrifice the “form” over the “function” or vice versa, but ironically many web designers tend to still do this.
We’d recommend checking your site to make sure your beautifully designed website isn’t affecting your ability to rank high in search engines.
Missing SEO Elements On Your Webpages (Like H1 Tags)
Many website designers and developers tend to forget about essential SEO elements and this is often seen happening on the homepage because “there isn’t a place for it on the page.” An example of key SEO elements left by the wayside including H1 tags, H2 Tags, H3 tags, etc.
For reference, the H1 tag is one of the key elements that search engine crawlers take a look at to determine what the content of that page is all about. You can imagine that having this tag and including your target keyword(s) will help improve your chances of ranking higher significantly.
A good example of a website that tackles this well is Sprout Social.
Sprout Social tends to do an excellent job with these key elements on their homepage by including good use of tags and a call-to-action that stands out and is… actionable. To be more specific, the company has a strong, non-branded H1 tag that gets straight to the point. The H1 tag state the following: “Schedule. Publish. Analyze” and the tag is placed front and center while there is good use of H3 tags as well: The H3 tag says the following: “Trusted by agencies, relied on by businesses,” and offers a clear call to action “Start Your Free Trial” that stands out with the bright green font color on an otherwise dark background.
If you’re interested in testing out the effectiveness of a website’s user experience, while benefitting from the proper use of various SEO elements including H1 tags – try the five-second test, which is a great rule of thumb. According to the five-second test, if someone using your site can tell you what the web page is about after looking at it for only five seconds, the user experience is great and the job is likely well-done!
The Use of Large Media Files Like Images and Videos
We all know that using the right imagery can help bring a website together, but you definitely need to be careful with the size of your media files. If you include large images and videos on your website, it can negatively impact your site speed, which may result in lower rankings.
This isn’t exactly new information but Google rewards pages that load quickly as this provides a better user experience. Let’s be real, users don’t like to wait for pages to load for a long time and Google will penalize those that do, as they want to create the best experience for their users.
So how exactly do you know if your website has large media files and how can you go about fixing it?
You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool to help you determine what images Google thinks are too large on a certain webpage. Alternatively, you can also use a tool like Screaming Frog to identify large images and media files across your website. Once you have a list of media content that falls under the category of being too large, you can resize and/or compress them and re-upload them to your website.
Other things to keep in mind when trying to improve your page speed is to consider the following:
Without activating page caching, you’re basically asking the server to load your page every time a visitor requests it from scratch. By using page cache, you can send the webpage to your user immediately. The only downside here is that pages that require authentication can’t be cached and if you made some changes to one of your webpages, you’ll need to refresh your cache or wait for it to expire before the changes show up.
If you hire a cheap or inexperienced developer, there is a great chance that your site is built with messy and disorganized code. Here are some big offenders that lead to a higher page load time according to Lara Swanson:
If you feel your code may not clean as it can be, here are some resources that may be useful to you:
The Use of Text in Images
We still don’t get why this is a recurring issue and surprisingly it’s been an issue for quite some time. Instead of putting a text layer over an image, many website designers tend to just include text into an image.
So why exactly is doing this such a bad thing?
The biggest reason is because search engine crawlers can’t “see” images the same way people can. This results in the search engine being able unable to “read” the text that is on the image, which means it’s equivalent to having no text at all.
[irp]
Most website designers who make this mistake replace text headers with images, as they feel it makes the content pop and look amazing. For search engines it’s a useful on-page element that helps them understand the purpose of your content. To be more specific, it accounts for a 15.04% chunk of Google’s Ranking Algorithm.
One of the other reasons why this tactic is subpar is because it isn’t responsive! On a mobile device, the text and the button are going to appear very small, which causes a poor user experience. Google’s emphasis on mobile-friendliness will also be a sore spot for you if this tactic is used.
Not Optimizing Your Media with SEO
Search engine crawlers tend to crawl media content by looking for certain information in prominent locations. Elements such as images, flash files, and java applets are typically ignored by search engines, instead search engine crawlers are only able to:
According to Roman Bębenista, “websites well-optimized for graphics, the number of visits resulting from image search may vary from 20 to even 60% of all visits from Google.”
Some quick tips to help you optimize the images on your website:
If you’re interested in learning about optimizing your images more in depth, watch Peter Linsley’s presentation on Google Image Search:
Just like with images, Google expects you to provide relevant mark up information for your videos as well, via the use of Schema markup. The relevance of your video is determined by a series of factors such as the video transcript, the text that surrounds the video, the video caption and the meta information that you share. That being said, the quality of the content in your videos is what helps to drive engagement and build a loyal audience, which in the end is what will ultimately affect your rankings.
On a separate note, we recommend not configuring video pages with complex JavaScript, Flash, and hash tags as this would not surface correctly in video search since Google can’t provide a unique URL to users in this scenario.
Serving Intrusive Popups
Google recently warned webmasters to avoid using intrusive interstitials and popups. The primary reason was because of poor user experience on mobile devices. Essentially when users are faced with popups before they can access the main content on a website, it can negatively impact their user experience and therefore your SEO.
The ads were getting so bad that Chrome even started to block them from appearing by default.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t consider the use of popups at all. Google doesn’t penalize non-intrusive interstitials. Popups for the use of anything you’re legally required to display to restrict content or keep your users informed like age verification or cookie use are allowed. Other popups such as banner ads, slide-ins, inlines and tabs, that take a reasonable portion of the screen are also OK as long as they are easy to remove. A reasonable portion of the screen consists of anything that takes up 15% or less of the screen.
There are several good cases and uses of popups such as those used by Entrepreneur.com, which found a 162% increase in sales by serving limited time offers in pop-ups to targeted visitors. Another success story is that of Webmeup which received 95% of its subscribers from popups in its first several months.
If you’re considering going this route, make sure that the popup is related to the content and design it with a nice overlay. Any coupon code or enticing copywriting can make the popup an effective one. Here are some things to keep in mind:
Thin Content
Pages that discuss your product(s) or service(s) tend to be the most important pages on the website. The higher the rankings you can get for these pages for your target keywords, the more traffic and ultimately business you will drive – it’s usually that simple. Common mistakes related to thin content include the following:
Improper Use of Infinite Scroll
Infinite scroll is a popular web design technique that can weaken your SEO performance when not done correctly and unfortunately, many developers who implement this technique tend to do so incorrectly.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with infinite scroll, it essentially loads more content as the user gets to the bottom of the page. If your pagination isn’t setup correctly than search engines won’t be able to crawl the necessary content on your site. To give you an example of this, let’s say you have fifty pages worth of blog content and you show ten blogs per page by default. The search engine robots will only see the ten most recent posts. Since the robots only crawl via links, there is no way for them to know there is more content on the page beyond the most recent ten articles.
If you really feel that infinite scroll is the way you want to go on your website, there is some good news. You can make the infinite scroll pages search-friendly by following the instructions on Google’s Webmaster Blog. By doing this, you won’t have to compromise between your design preferences and SEO.
Conclusion
The person/people working on your website design, development, and SEO need to coordinate with one another and make sure that they are creating a seamless user experience while still achieving business goals.
We’ve outlined some of the common mistakes that are often made by both small and large companies alike with some actionable items for each. Make sure you stay on top of best practices for your website, which should open up the opportunity for you to rank for the keywords you want to be ranking for!
Have you found any of the above mistakes on your website? Do you have any other critical SEO-hurting design or development issues in mind?