Top SEO Mistakes That Web Designers Do
We all know how important web design is for an online business.
But however don’t forget to evaluate the web designer job and pay attention
Check out list of top SEO mistakes that web designers do :
1. Missing Meta Tags(Meta Title, Meta Description,H1…)
Tell me how many times you saw a website where the homepage title was only “Homepage” and the description was “Default Description”. I saw that on many websites and web designers still make these mistakes as they don’t really care about website SEO.
If you are trying to rank well on search engines please make sure to have a nice and descriptive meta title and meta description.
As we said many times before meta titles should not be longer then 70 characters long and meta description not longer then 160 characters long.
Also h1 .. .h6 tags are often missing in most of the themes that are being sold in the market for WordPress, Magento, Shopify, etc. Make sure to have nice structure of the website where the most imporant thing will be wraped in <h1></h1> tag. I usually put product names, category names as h1 tags.
Second most important thing on that particular page should be wrapped in h2, and so on as much as you like. I would suggest only one h1 tag per web page.
2. Preventing Web Crawlers
Imagine you have done everything right. On-Page SEO is blooming, you are spending a lot of money on OFF-side SEO and still you are not appearing anywhere in the search results for your website niche.
It’s a usual practice to disable web crawlers to index the website while still in design with the meta tag, or also from the robots.txt file which is often found in
The problem happens when web designers forget to change the tag and make the web pages accesible for the web crawlers.
How you can check if your website is accessible for the crawlers.
- Right click on the web page you want to check
- Click View Page Source
- Search for <meta name=”robots” content=”” />
- Inside content it should say INDEX;FOLLOW.
If this is ok, then the next step will be to check the robots.txt file.
Type http://www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt
If this is the content you see:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
this means that robots.txt file is preventing all crawlers to crawl your website.
The results of that will be never showing up on search engine rankings.
Make sure to disallow only pages and areas that you don’t want to rank for.
3. Website Navigation
Proper navigation means a lot for SEO. Making everything accessible through the homepage or every other page is really important for the search engines, except if you want to hide something 🙂 and never rank for.
Always aim to make your navigation descriptive with using the right keywords in it. That can help you rank higher and have a better user experience as well.
The usual mistakes that I come across are:
- Not clickable elements in the navigation
- Too small elements for mobile. If you have fat fingers it will be impossible to touch them
- Links leading to 404 error pages
Hamburger menu for mobile devices was revolutionary and that was for a reason. Imagine showing website with 30categories in the main navigation on a mobile device. Hell right?
4. SSL(HTTPS)
Awesome design, great content, fast loading web page but still no SSL. in 2019 it’s almost impossible to rank a web page without https protocol behind it. GOOGLE said and clarified that as well.
You don’t need an SSL while the website is in development, but make sure to acquire one before launching the website. If you already have an established website and still it’s not opening through HTTPS, be fast and buy one immediately.
Search engines really care about user security, but one more reason to have SSL is also to gain trust from your customers that they will be secured while shopping/reading from your website.
5. Huge Media Files
Cannot directly affect your SEO, but can affect user experience and Page load of your website.
Yeah, web designers can do cool stuff like overlay banners, video stories while scrolling,3D models on the fly, sliders with a lot of images and much more… You probably see these things on every second page nowadays.
But what is really important to keep your web page healthy is to optimize the media files.
Use compressed images, embed videos, call resources from a CDN and make sure your website is not too heavy so it can load fast on mobile devices as well.
Pagespeed and website usability are really important SEO factors.
Follow our SEO guide for beginners to find out how to check your page load issues and scores.
HINT! Section 2: On-Page SEO -> Pagespeed.
6. Duplicate Content
Plagiarism is your enemy. Never try to post the same content twice or more just to cover some space.
You want to have unique content, if you want to beat your competition on search engines.
What I see usually on websites is using the same content for similar variations of products. Yes, I understand that some can be different just in color but at least mix up the wordings and don’t use the same generic way of creating content as your competitors.
At the end that’s how you win the fight!
7. Non-Responsive Design
When talking about responsive design we usually talk about making your website look beautiful across every kind of device.
Mobile, Desktop, Tables should be able to use the website properly.
Check if your website is responsive here: Google Mobile-Friendly Tool
In 2019 probably most of your traffic is coming from mobile devices and they deserve to see the content as they expect to. Google is really strict about that as well. It’s hard to find non-responsive websites on top SERPS
Make sure to always run a mobile-friendly test on your web page after web designer changes something.
8. Sending Away Traffic
Fancy elements like Instagram image board, facebook social stream, tweets stream, Pinterest pinboard and much more, are welcomed and really nice, but usually sends away your hard earned traffic to another web page.
Such blocks are good on specific pages, but i strongly recommend to not include any on your money pages like product page when we talk about e-commerce business.
You want customers to buy your product not to visit your Instagram profile from this point.
CONCLUSION:
SEO is closely-related to web design and programming. Web designers can improve your website SEO, by fixing and applying all the important SEO points, but on the other hand side, they can ruin your hard work, and never reach the top page on search engines.
SEO enthusiast and PHP Web Developer. I love the tech and marketing world. Also, a part-time traveler who enjoys nature.
