The design is the most crucial part of any application. Developers and designers place a lot of effort into creating a clean and professional looking design because web designs can convert a website visitor into a customer and it can also divert the users to alternative websites.
Clients hire an expert and dedicated developers to produce a flexible and a professional looking application, but they neglect the SEO friendly design which needs to be implemented at the beginning of the designing process and as a result, they have to pay tenfold cost to the SEO experts to fix the designing issues.
It is fruitless to create a web application that does not appear in the searching engines result. When designing the applications, the designers need to focus on creating a user-friendly and an SEO friendly design. Even the smallest designing mistakes can become a hurdle in the improvement of the website visibility in the searching engines.
Following is the list of the worst SEO mistakes that you can commit when designing the web application:
Ignoring Responsive Designing
40% of the users turn to alternative websites, because of unfriendly website designs. In the past, the business websites were able to rank well in the searching engines without having a responsive design, but those days have changed. Google searching algorithm has become more advanced and intelligent with regular updates. Google looks at the website from the user’s point of view. Google has stated that it demotes the websites without a responsive design and promote the rank of the websites with a mobile-friendly design.
In addition to the responsive design, the loading speed of the application also pass a negative signal to the google bots. Slow loading speed becomes a hindrance in the indexing of the website. If a website loading speed exceeds more than 5 sec, then users abandon the website and find an alternative website, but if we want to receive a high amount of traffic and increased visibility in SERP then we need to boost the loading speed of our website.
You can check the google webmaster tool to test the mobile-friendly design of your website.
Using Flash
Even though the web pages with flash look more attractive and appealing to the audience, adding too much flash contents on the website is an ineffective decision. Google Bots have difficulty scanning and indexing the flash contents and it is not possible to get a higher rank in the searching engine if the Google bots are unable to see your website contents. But we can use HTML5, CSS3, and JQuery as an alternative to creating a search engine friendly website.
Using JavaScript for Designing
Content is the reason the audience view your website. Websites with complicated web design and navigation structures are always abounded by the users. Most developers use the JavaScript to create an appealing website design, but developers should not design the whole website with JavaScript, because using too much JavaScript on the website also cause indexing issues. HTML can be used as an alternative solution to create SEO friendly navigation structure and designs.
Marketers, SEO specialists, and bloggers can utilize the Google robot testing tool to find any errors that is noticed by Google crawler while crawling the robots.txt files. Even a single error in the robot.txt file can cause a significant amount of drop in the website visibility.
Overused Stock Images
Contents with high definition images are said to drive more traffic to blogs and websites as compared to contents with zero images. Images increase the user experience, but overuse of images would not only slow down the website speed but it would also bounce the users to other websites. To avoid the slow loading speed, we should limit and compressed images.
Sometimes, the designers even use images on the buttons instead of text because of lack of knowledge and when the website is crawled by Google. The spider or Google bots are unable to read the text on the images. Google bots cannot read the videos or images but we can assign an alternative name to the images to help the bots understand the category of images.
Using Inappropriate Keywords
Keywords are also one of a ranking factor in the searching engines results. Using the wrong keywords or overuse of the keywords not only affect the SEO, but it also increases the bounce rate of a website. When selecting the keywords for a website, we should keep an eye on the trending keywords to stay ahead of our competitors, because all the tools that we use for keyword planning are also used by our competitors. But to defeat our competitors, we need to adopt a slightly different approach. You can also use the google searching engine to get more keyword ideas. To get keyword ideas from Google, we need to type and search for particular keywords in the google searching engine. After the searching results are displayed, we can check the list of suggestion at the bottom of the searching engines result to get more ideas on selecting the keywords.
Conclusion
During the software development phase, the developers communicate with the testers to fix the bugs that arise in the testing phase, but in addition to the testers, the developers also need to communicate with the SEO team to create an SEO friendly design. The search engine algorithms are constantly changing and both the designers and the developers need to keep up with the changes to produce an SEO friendly application. By avoiding the common SEO designing mistakes, we can provide a better chance for our website so that it could rank higher in the searching engines.
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