11 Feb Don’t Make These Website SEO Mistakes
SEO is a growing concern for many businesses, and they will go to many lengths to make sure their website is performing in this arena. But as a business owner, do you equate a fancy, animated website with a well-functioning SEO-friendly site? There are some big mistakes that are being made from the design phase – make sure your site doesn’t have these common ones.
Don’t get flashy
Creating a website entirely of Flash might look really cool, but they are virtually invisible to search engines. Even if your menu is flash or graphic-based instead of text it will impede your SEO efforts. The keywords and phrases you worked so hard to create will not be picked up at all. Additionally, with all the different browser options and increasing use of mobile website viewing it is likely that your site will be unable to be viewed by most visitors.
Page errors and link graveyards
Whether you have just redesigned your website or, conversely, haven’t updated it in quite some time, it is a good idea to routinely check your links and menus. Do your pages navigate or redirect properly or are you taken to a broken link or error page?
Also, you do not want to lose valuable SEO from old pages that may have been moved. You can use 301 redirects to point back to your old pages if this is the case.
Bizarre URL characters
URLs to all of your pages are vital in search engine optimization. Having URLs that read something like www.yourwebsite.com/detail?id=1 are a huge mistake in SEO. Make sure each page’s URL accurately describes the page you are on. If pages are named with keywords that people are using to find your site, you can even triple your SEO power!
Slow going
Pages with graphics that are too large take a long time to load. This may or may not directly affect your SEO, but Google reported in 2010 that fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into the ranking. What you can count on, however, is that most visitors will leave your site if it takes too long to load, and that DOES affect your SEO.
