SEO restricts the creativity of the designers, and thus web designers ignore SEO while web designing! But if SEO is ignored, your beautiful web design will just go to waste when you don’t have visitors to your site at all. Do not hope for free traffic from search engines if you have not followed the standard guidelines of a webmaster to make sure the visitor gets a good user experience.
We list 6 dreadful design mistakes to avoid in web designing, so that your website isn’t lost in rankings of the search.
1) Putting valuable information on images
It is quite obvious that search engines understand the text content. Though serving images, podcasts or videos to the audience engages them, your main motive must be drawing audience to them first. Search engines look for keywords in important locations. The most vital content of your website might be ignored if you have put them in images or flash files. Try and use text to display essential names, links or contents. Do not make the mistake of replacing the text headers with pictures. The best way to practice using images is to include the keywords in the images’ alt texts.
2) Ignoring the visitors on mobile
Consumers spend around 69% of the time on smart phones. Hence, you must ensure that your website is responsive to the mobile audience as well. Though the responsive design of the website isn’t mainly a ranking factor, it is recommended by Google to the webmasters to turn their sites into a mobile friendly one. A design that is responsive will provide a consistent experience to the users on all devices. It will also increase the engagement of the audience in your website.
3) 404 page
You would not wish to lose the audience who would have entered a wrong URL or have opened a broken link given on your website. You might want to give a good experience even to such audience hoping they will reminisce your brand later. You would have also designed a good looking 404 page. However, you would have forgotten to provide a link back to your page. This might seem a tiny issue and web masters tend to miss it quite often. This can lead to loss of rankings on the search engine.
4) Unwanted pop up ads
These ads will not be indexed by the search engines. They aren’t even actually a portion of work plate of the designer. Such intrusive ads might compel the users to hit the close button the moment they pop up. That is the reason Google chrome blocks them by default. However, they still make it to the mainstream usage because of extraordinary results they get.
5) Using too many frames or flash
Flash can be attractive visually, but search engines do not index them. A home page designed on flash can be one of the biggest blunders in SEO. 78% of users say that they dislike flash. You should not be using flash even in vital aspects of your website as it can affect usability of the website.
6) Filling up the webpage
All those visually attractive animations, graphics, widgets and redundant codes will result in slower loading of the page. Besides being a bad experience for users, they are also one of the essential factors in deciding search engine rankings. Avoid stacking your web page with such images.
