Common Web Design Oversights Which Could Be Limiting The Effectiveness Of The Traffic You Receive & How To Correct This Mistake To Increase Your Traffic
Wasting space in the first fold of the webpage
The first fold of your webpage, the part of the page the visitor sees before having to scroll down, is the most valuable part of your webpage. Don’t waste it with very large logos and graphics.
Deliver the information to your visitors as quickly as possible and you’re more likely to end up converting them into a customer. Remember “The money is in the content”
Flash Intro’s
Major mistake – don’t do it.
Here are 3 good reasons why:
Flash can’t be spidered, so anything presented in flash instead of being presented in text is robbing your site of keyword-rich content. The text on the web page can actually be spidered by the meta crawler and is very important to your search engine position! The majority of people do not want to watch a flash intro. They immediately look for the “skip” button, or just go back to the results and keep searching. Bye bye customer. Animations use a lot of bandwidth, so they cause your page to load much more slowly. This annoys the heck out of visitors causing them to click back and search for a page which gives them the information they want faster.
Bells and Whistles
Flash banners, animations, exploding text, spinning text, glowing text, etc… It’s all very fancy and impressive – the first time you see it, but not so much the thousandth time. But truly, think about it… It’s completely pointless and counter-productive!
All of this uses up precious bandwidth and therefore causes pages to load slower, which you obviously don’t want if you want your prospect to stick around. None of it can be spidered by the search engines and it doesn’t do anything positive for your search engine position.
Anything that takes attention away from your page content should be avoided full stop. You want people to read your content, click on your text links, join your newsletter, and buy your products. You don’t want them to sit there “oohing and ahhing” at your lovely bouncing, exploding, glowing, dancing banners!
Using Images As Navigation Buttons
Did you know that images cannot be spidered by the search engines? Whenever you use images as links instead of text, you are missing out on an opportunity to use text, which the search engines love and can actually see and add towards your page ranking.
The unnecessary use of images also adds to the page file size and therefore to the time it takes for the page to load.
Using Text pictures
I still often see websites with text images rather than plain text. I’ve even seen websites constructed of only text images, little or no plain text at all!
The fact is, as I keep saying, search engines do not see images. Alright there is the alt tag, and you should use the alt tag on any images you do have, but all the text on your web page should be text, not text images. Why rob your webpages of highly valuable content?
Plus as I also keep repeating, unnecessary images take up precious bandwidth, and make pages load slower.
The only time I would ever use a picture to display text would be in a logo, and even then I would ask, do you really need a logo image at all? Many websites do very well using only text.
Using Frames
Unless you want to create yourself a whole truckload of more work, the best bet is not to use frames.
Why? They cause major problems with search engine promotion, and while there are ways around it, it’s really not worth the bother.
If your site is already in frames, my advice is to get rid of them now.
By: Kevin John Lewis
About the Author:
Kevin John Lewis is a professional search engine marketing / SEO Consultant
Based in Cheshire, UK (Close to Manchester) – Kevin delivers effective SEO services, and SEO web design and prides himself on the increases in the quantity & quality of search engine traffic that he achieves for his clients.
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