As a business owner, you probably spend a lot of time thinking about your website. You probably work on ways to boost organic traffic, increase the number of subscribers to your email newsletter, and post regular articles to your blog.
Well, you not only have to think about what your website should do, you should think about what it shouldn’t do too.
In a world where you often feel like you aren’t doing enough, it can feel good to let a few things go! With these five things your website shouldn’t do, you can make your website better and you can lessen your workload in the process.
Contain Poor Links
Links are extremely important. They are so important that in the past, it was better for your SEO strategy to include as many links as you could on your website. That’s not the case anymore.
Links continue to be important, but the quality of those links is even more important than the quantity. You should have a small selection of links on your website that are relevant to the content they are being linked to. It’s even better if you only link to sites with a high domain authority.
Send Visitors to Another Website
This one can be tricky because you should build links in your content. Many of those links should connect visitors to other pages on your website, but some of them should link to other sites.
That can be bad for business. You never want to knowingly send a visitor to another website!
So, how are you supposed to include high-quality links in your content without driving visitors away? The answer is linking that site so it opens in a new window or a new tab. That way, your visitor can return to your website easily.
Post Images Without ALT Tags
It was easy to ignore ALT tags for a long time. Search engines didn’t really pay attention to them. The sites that were labeling images were doing so for accessibility reasons. Visitors that have visual challenges could use a reader to learn about the content on a site.
That’s not the case anymore. ALT tags are still helpful for the visually impaired, but search engines want to see them too. They can’t identify what is in an image, so they need an ALT tag to determine what the image contains.
Not only will using relevant images on your website engage your visitors, images can boost your SEO, especially if you include keywords in your ALT tags.
Have Any Fancy Extras
When the internet was new, nothing was cooler than Flash on a website. That’s not the case anymore. Most people think Flash is more annoying than it’s worth.
In addition to making sure you leave Flash off your website, there are a number of other fancy extras that your website can do without that include:
- Moving text
- Fancy cursors
- Music that plays automatically
You might be wondering about video? Many websites manage to make video work, even when it starts playing automatically. However, you have to make sure the content in the video is relevant to your website, its placement on the page is obvious, and it can very easily be muted or paused. You don’t want to alienate your visitors by subjecting them to a video they aren’t interested in watching.
List Everything You Do
This one often comes as a huge surprise to business owners. After all, shouldn’t you share all of your products and services on your website?
The answer is no, kind of.
Never list every single thing you do on one page. Your website should have a hierarchy where people can click and search smaller pieces of digestible content to learn more about what you do.
However, even on those pages you may not need to list out every single thing you do. For example, a roofer doesn’t need to go into detail about the types of nails they use and how the flashing is installed. A visitor to the website just wants to know more about the types of roofs you offer and the quality of the customer service you provide.
Don’t get caught up in making your website do everything that’s humanly possible! A smaller, higher-quality website is better than a large, low-quality website any day.
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