Since the beginning of the internet world and online businesses were born, the websites of companies have evolved a lot. They have gone from having boring webs with a lot of text, not very suggestive and static, to having super attractive web pages with a lot of visual resources, in order to attract the user. There are many cheap website design solutions for your business, click to discover more about C Website Design.
For this reason, today, most companies focus on having a current design and seduce to attract more and more users, but without taking into account, in many cases, that a nice design for people, does not mean that is good for Google, that after all is who chooses if it will show us in the search results.
To avoid falling into this error of creating websites for users without also considering Google, we will give you 5 tips on how not to negatively affect SEO with the design of your website.
1. Headings (H1, H2, H3…)
The headings are the titles that we find on a page. They are content with a different typography than the rest, normally larger and sometimes of different color.
What we find many times with this is that the themes or templates of the different CMS (Content Management System) already have their pre-set font to help people who do not know how to change it. The problem is that sometimes SEO is not taken into account and it is done only taking into account the design of the page, so the semantics of the web is not implemented correctly.
The main reason for this is that Headings are very important for SEO, because they provide Google with semantic information, that is, what is relevant at the content level.
On the other hand, we also see cases of pages that have an H1 (which would be correct), and the next header is an H3. What is the problem? Well, the H2 give more relevance to the content than an H3, and therefore we are losing the strength that H2 can provide us to help position key words that are written in that heading, only for design issues. In addition, semantically there is a hierarchy of information that, in this case, is not being implemented.
To finish with this first advice, tell you that, when creating the structure of the Headings, you must take into account both the design and the SEO. As we mentioned, the headlines are a very important point for SEO: they help in the structure of information on the web so that Google knows which keywords are relevant to you and your business, and help users to understand better and faster what your website is about and what you will find in it.
2. Very heavy images and videos without resizing
This can be applied to any type of multimedia file so to speak. But in this case we are going to focus on the images and videos, since they are the most used and, to a large extent, the heaviest.
Many people think that they can upload any image on their website just because it is beautiful, without having anything else in mind. But it is not like that, since it can directly affect the SEO.
For example, uploading an image without taking into account its weight, directly affects the loading speed of the web, and this is a relevant SEO factor for Google. It is also a very relevant factor at the user level, since we imagine that a person arrives at your website and it takes about 4 or 5 seconds to load, you know what will happen ?: That this person will not enter your website.
Therefore, it is important and necessary to optimize the weight of the images and videos before uploading them to your website, so that the site loads like lightning and you do not lose any possible client along the way. For this there are several tools, such as: TinyPNG, Kraken.io or Compressor.io, which are used to optimize images online. And there are also plugins that do it automatically when uploading images to your website. In addition, to check the loading speed of your website you have tools such as Google PageSpeed and GTMetrix.
And, to finish this section, also remind you that it is very important to resize the images before uploading them to your website because, as in the previous case, it can affect your WPO (Web Performance Optimization) which is very important in SEO. This is very simple to understand: if the space where you are going to put the image on your website is small and you are putting an extra large image, the only thing you get is that this image weighs more and, therefore, affects the speed of loading your website. Also, at the level of the browser rendering engine, this type of actions consume many resources, which makes the web go slower.
3. Little text on the pages
As we can all see, there are many websites where content is a bit scarce because of having a large number of images and videos to attract the user?
But, as we have said before, not only do we have to attract users, but we also have to attract Google, so to speak. Therefore, our pages must have content.
The content is what Google reads to know what your website is about, which is why it is very important for us to position ourselves. We must have a text according to the theme of our pages, an attractive text for people to read and stay on our site, and an optimized text so that Google likes and helps us position.
How is a text optimized? Both the Headings and the text itself contain Keywords to position and that are related. For example: If our website talks about pants then use the words pants, jeans, jeans, etc.
So, the images are fine, but we should not abuse them or just put images, because Google needs the text to know what your website is about.
4. Many scroll to find the information
This point does not affect SEO so directly, but it can affect indirectly. Why? Very simple: if our website is not very adapted for the usability of the user, when he enters the web if he has to scroll and scroll to reach what he is looking for, he may very well leave.
And this is when it hurts SEO, when a person enters your website, scrolls and leaves. This increases the bounce rate of your page, or in other words: the percentage of people, who arrive at your website and, without browsing, leaves your site. This is a very important factor because, if for Google you have a very high value in this sense (that is, your% bounce is high), then consider that your website does not have quality content and that is why users they abandon Then it does not help you to position, but rather the opposite.
In conclusion, that people who enter your page have to scroll is fine, but always thinking about the user’s experience, not that the web is super visual if it implies little usability and, therefore, harm us.
5. Pop up and interstitial
And finally, name the Pop ups and interstitial, those emerging tabs that all users hate to find when entering a page.
Why do they affect SEO? Very simple, because Google is looking for users to have a good experience in the web pages shown in the SERPs. Simply because if Google only gave results without any, whatever they were, for all those people who use Google, would not have any value, and we would stop using it as a search engine.
That’s why Google does not like web sites with this kind of pop-up windows, because it causes a bad user experience. And if it happens when you are with a computer it can become acceptable, but when it happens with a mobile, the user experience is really negative, since our screen is much smaller.
Yes it is true that they are very useful to increase conversions, but the right thing would be pop ups not so intrusive, that occupy a small space on the screen, not all of it, that does not hide the content of the web … In summary, it does not annoy the users.
And here’s the post of today, I hope you liked it and that you do not fall into these failures when creating your website, as it is very positive that you have a current image and that it is attractive, but it is also important to think about the SEO strategy!