Loading ...When a company decides to create a web presence it is an exciting time and watching the search results pages can be exhilarating. This is commonly called the ‘honeymoon phase’ and once that is over, reality sets in. During the initial phase it is normal not to notice any problems, but when things aren’t progressing as it should, the cracks start showing. It is also normal to blame the optimising and/or marketing efforts as being the problem. Normally though, the problems lie within the website itself.
If there are problems with the website design, or architecture and programming, it will cause a snowball effect of problems. These problems made in the initial stages of developing your website can become very costly. Not only costly to rectify, but also in view of losing out on potential clients to the competition.
The thing most people do not understand is that you can have perfect SEO efforts and your marketing strategy can be top notch. None of it will be any good if you have fundamental problems with your website as the search engines will not be able to index your web pages. Your site visitors will not be able to navigate properly and find what they are looking for either.
Clean, text based links
Do not hinder your site navigation with Flash, drop down menus or images. Understand that the crawlers will give up if they have to struggle to crawl your web pages so it is much better to use text-based HTML links for your navigation. Search engines cannot easily find hidden pages. Pages where site visitors have to log in or have to return to the site with an activation code will prevent the SEs from finding it. Making the search engines battle to crawl and index web pages is completely counter productive for any SEO efforts.
Excessive linking in-site
Linking is a must for in-site and text based links into the deeper levels of a website cannot be neglected or the deeper pages will not be indexed. On the other hand, if you go overboard with totally unnecessary on-site links you will not only totally confuse the web crawlers. You will also make things difficult for your website users. Remember to think like your web traffic; if things are being made difficult for them, they become irritated and will leave.
Get rid of old school ideas
Frames are just plain bad; the look bad and they confuse the web crawlers. There is simply no need for using frames, so get rid of them. They never worked well years ago and they are making your website unfriendly to the search engines and your human website visitors. URLs that look like they stretch from London to Moscow are plain bad web design.
It is a clear give-away that serious mistakes were made when the website was built. When the search engines come across these URLs they get totally lost and the deeper levels of your website will not be indexed. So, for successful SEO, make sure that your web design, programming and structure does not shoot you’re your optimization down in flames.
Related posts:
- What are SEO design mistakes?
- Common web design mistakes that can damage the SEO of your business
- Web design and SEO partnerships
- Four website design flaws that users do not like
- SEO is not a web design freebie
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