Six Mistakes To Avoid Regarding Web Design To Improve Your Site's SEO

Good web design is a key component of search engine optimization. Unfortunately, a lot of site owners make web design mistakes that make it harder for them to rank in search engines.

The following are six web design mistakes to avoid to improve the SEO of your website:

URLs that aren't designed for search engines to crawl

There are numerous things that can be done with URLs that can make them easier for search engine crawlers to deal with. For example, the URLs or individual pages within a site should include keywords and not have query strings in them. 

It's important for SEO reasons not to leave URLs that are automatically created by content management systems (CMSes) in place that are just random numbers. You need to use a CMS that allows you the possibility to make custom URLs. 

Putting metadata on your site that is not unique

All content on a page should ideally be unique. This includes metadata. Sometimes, web designers will make the mistake of using a template that includes duplicate text when creating a website.

If this is done, it's important to go back and put in original metadata to avoid duplicate content that will make SEO harder. 

Misusing heading tags

Heading tags are important for breaking up chunks of text and providing an HTML structure. It's important to use these tags appropriately because they will improve the look of your website design. Make sure you're creating a hierarchy and going from bigger to smaller with your heading tags. 

Having site navigation in place that is difficult for search engines to decipher

JavaScript and CSS need to be strategically used to make site navigation easy for search engines. Avoid using programs that complicate site navigation and aim for simplicity with unobtrusive coding.

Failing to keep JavaScript and CSS outside of HTML

Any JavaScript and CSS code should not be included in HTML. Putting these scripts in your HTML will unnecessarily add lines of code that will make it so that search engines crawl them more slowly and require more effort to do so. 

Leaving pages open to search engines that you want blocked

It's not uncommon for a website owner to want to have certain content blocked from search engines. With these pages, it's important to use the disallow search command in your code so that search engines will not list these pages. 

For help improving the SEO of your website, contact a local SEO company.


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