It stands to reason that your website should look great and catch the eye, but it’s important that you weed out any errors or issues that could stop your site from ranking high up search listings. Here are some common mistakes that could be harming your SEO.
Using large images and files
If you include large images or media files on your website, you risk these slowing down your site load time. When your pages grind to a halt, it puts viewers off. According to Forbes, a one-second delay in page load times equals 11% fewer page views. Search engines are equally unimpressed and will punish slow loading websites with a drop to their search rankings.
Using pop-ups
Pop-ups do little to enhance the user experience, and Google has made it clear that sites that make use of these, could find it harms their SEO. Pop-ups are especially frowned upon if they appear before a user has even accessed the main content of a site.
Poor product or service page content
If your product or service page content is a little thin, or is non-existent, search engines won’t look at you favourably. This is the most important content you can have on your site, so include descriptive information, devote a single page to individual products, or one idea or keyword per page, to boost your rankings.
Removing H1 tags
If H1 tags are missing or have been removed, particularly on the home page, search engines will struggle to know what you’re about, and it could jeopardise your SEO. Make sure to include the H1 tag with your target keyword to increase your chances of ranking highly. Seek assistance, web design and seo by digitel SEO Gloucester experts if you struggle.
Infinite scroll
Avoid infinite scroll on your site, as this type of pagination won’t allow search engines to accurately crawl your content.
Text in images
Including text in images, instead of adding a text layer over images, results in search engines being unable to read the text. Essentially, this is the same as not including any text at all, making it harder for search engines to rank your site accordingly. Additionally, this ill-conceived strategy isn’t responsive, and can hamper the user experience, especially if viewing content on a mobile device.
