In today’s online business practices we have to take many things into consideration. Some of them are vital, others not that important but everything needs to be taken into account. And when we regard the client – the web design and the SEO are of most importance. One might say that they are the two sides of the same coin, and one won’t be wrong.

 

Sometimes when we improve our site’s web design, our SEO suffers and there are some mistakes that are, unfortunately, quite common. It is not worth it! In this article, we will share the most popular mistakes, why they are bad for us and how to avoid them successfully.

1. Lack of Responsive Design

 

In today’s modern world it is a real crime towards your business to lack responsive design. More than 40% of searches are made through a Smartphone or tablet and less than surprisingly 17% of all websites have responsive design.  You don’t want to end up in this unacceptable group, right?

Google even announced a search update that will penalize non-responsive websites so the faster you make your pages responsive – the better for you!

2. Absence or Inadequate Usage of Headings and Footers

Removing the H1 tag, because it doesn’t fit in your design is a terrible mistake because this tag is one of the first components that search engine crawlers search for, in order to understand the topic of the page. We definitely recommend including your targeted keyword in the tag if you want to rank higher.

Many people think that the header and footer areas are especially for advertisements. However, a number of ads need to be considered carefully because little real content and lots of ads will do you no good.

3. Including Important Text in Images

This is a very widespread problem caused only by the lack of information. This is because search engines cannot ‘read’ the text included in the image.

A good fix for that is adding a text layer with all important information above the image. That way you will have the same effect that will work in accordance with your SEO.

4. Content Is the SEO Foundation

Content quality has always been the number 1 ranking search engine criteria. Still, many businesses decide to spend hundreds of dollars in creating a beautiful sleek design and somehow disregard the importance of the actual content. This is an awful mistake that should not happen in the first place.

When redesigning your website always consider hiring an SEO specialist, because the web designer might just ignore existing rankings and do the needed thing so that you lose important traffic.

5. Page Loading Speed

As a user, there is nothing more frustrating than having to wait for a page to load. A recent survey showed that 47% of the users expect a web page to load in maximum 2 seconds. A minor delay of 1 second results in a 7% cut in possible clients and more than 70% of all users explained that they closed a website because it was too slow.

You don’t want to lose valuable clients just because your website is too slow, right? Not to mention that speed is a ranking factor according to Google and affects the important user experience factor. In short, make your website as fast as possible so you have happy users.

There are other factors that might help but following these main rules should improve your search engine ranking and increase your traffic. In short: don’t choose better web design over your SEO and after all – big changes start small, right?