After weeks of research and testing, you have finally finished SEO for your business website. You finished your website design and launch it to your eagerly awaiting target audience. But, after checking your analytics data, you noticed that your carefully constructed SEO isn’t performing as well as you thought. Your website ranking may have even fallen off the radar completely.
While you might think you’ll have to dive right back in to optimizing your website, wait! First thing to check is your website design. Something as simple as changing an item in the design can help your traffic flow much better and get you ranked on search engines.
Below, we discuss some of the designs that might be holding your website back from being amazing.
Flash can allow you to do some amazing things, design wise. However, it can greatly hinder your optimization effort. Have you ever gone to a website that stopped loading and asked you to install Flash, despite just installing it the other day for a different website? It’s pretty annoying, so think how your customers might feel if they were looking at your website. An unpopular design can cost you your ranking.
On top of visitors having to constantly update Flash, Google also cannot scan your website if it is heavily designed with it. If you want your website to rank high on search engines, dump Flash.
Images are a great way to highlight the topic of your text based content. However, do not rely solely on images for your website design. When Google is scanning your website, it’s glossing over those images as it uses mostly text to rank your website. Thus, causing you to miss a great chance to optimize. If you use images, make sure to insert some ALT text. This will allow Google to see any SEO and help your website rank.
Also, be sure that you are using the correct sizing and file type for your website images. If you are using an incorrect format or the image is so large it hinders load time, it’s time to optimize your images. Almost 50% of users expect the images to load within 2 seconds. Not sure what image types to use for your website? Check out this article by Fat Rabbit Creative for some tips!
Navigation is a huge part of a customer friendly design. If your visitors don’t know where they can contact you, or wonder where their shopping cart is, your ranking will hurt with search engines. Yes, that’s right. Search engines, like Google, can tell if your website has unsatisfactory user experience. Take a look at your design and make sure navigation is obvious and easy to understand.
As you can see, design and SEO go hand-in-hand to get your website noticed by search engines. If you want to rank higher, check on all factors of your website to get things right.
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