One of the fundamental factors that can seriously affect the success of an SEO and internet marketing campaign is website design and development. Before any new website build the guys here at SearchQuest make sure that all SEO factors are taken into account.
Many Web Agencies make the fatal mistake of handing a finished website over to their SEO as the final phase in the internet marketing process. The problem with this approach though is that the website designer may have (and probably has) produced that website with little to know knowledge of basic SEO and current SEO practices and requirements. This results in a website that can already be fighting an uphill struggle. The main mistakes that a Web Designer makes are:
- Code Heavy: Bloated code which includes on page CSS and JS. This creates slow load times which are bad for users and have (recently) become a ranking factor.
- Bad Menu Structures: What looks nice might not always best for your website’s SEO and usability. Maybe those fancy drop downs would be better if they were a standard HTML menu, which leads me on to my next point…
- Using Flash for menus and navigation: A big no no for SEO, menus should be HTML and CSS, the search engines love them and so will your visitors
- Images: Web designers like to use images a lot, the only problem is that search engines don’t know what’s in an image but they do have an understanding of text, text links are better than image links. There are ways to make image links work (like using CSS hidden text) but I’m sure the SEO has enough to do already!
- Duplicating content: Many developers don’t understand that duplicate content is not good for search engine rankings. Not just duplicate page content but also duplicate keyword targeting. You don’t want two page about the same keyword, you’re competing with yourself!
- Bad URLs: Many web developers don’t understand that the way they build a website will be copied by Google and will appear in the search engine listings as a clickable URL. Make them descriptive please!
That’s just a few of the many mistakes that a web designer and developer may make. Do you have any more?
SEOs, do yourself a favour! Get in the mix before anyone even opens Photoshop!
