Good web design isn’t just about making your website look pretty; they also help maximise your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts. Conversely, bad web design practices don’t just turn off potential customers; they can also earn you penalties from search engines such as Google, killing your SEO efforts.
Here are four web design mistakes that you should fix immediately.
On 21 April 2015, Google announced that it was including mobile-friendliness as part of its algorithm, making it a requirement for people who even want their websites to be listed in Google’s search engine results pages (SERP). This development reflected expectations that mobile traffic would eventually overtake desktop, which it did in 2016 when traffic from mobile devices accounted for 51.3% while desktop shrank to 48.7%.
If your website doesn’t work well on mobile, then you are losing more than half of your potential traffic and might not even appear in Google Searches! Fortunately, web design services in Brisbane will be more than happy to solve this problem, and Google should start indexing your website again once their web crawler indexes your mobile website.
Page load speeds are one of the most critical factors regarding SEO rankings. Slow-loading websites push visitors to leave before they’ve had a chance to see what you have to offer. This can significantly impact your search engine rankings, as search engines prioritise websites that offer a good user experience.
To ensure that your website loads quickly and efficiently, there are a few steps you can take. First, ensure that your website is optimised for speed by reducing the size of your images, minifying your code, and using caching tools. Additionally, consider switching to a faster web hosting provider that can provide better server speeds.
Title tags and meta descriptions are essential for SEO and should be included on each page of your website. These tags don’t affect how your website looks and performs, but web crawlers need to identify your content and serve it to your users. Search engines like Google also use meta descriptions in search results to help users find the content they’re looking for.
When it comes to website optimisation, internal links are often overlooked. But when used correctly, internal links can be a powerful tool for boosting your website’s SEO. Internal links point from one page to another on your website, helping search engine crawlers understand your website’s structure and how the different pages are related.
Good website builders in Brisbane use internal links to help you control the flow of “link juice” or “authority”, as it’s sometimes called. Link juice is a measure of how much authority a page has. Every page on your website has a certain amount of link juice, and when you link to other pages, you’re transferring some of that link juice to the other page. This can be a great way to boost the authority of your most important pages.
It’s essential to understand that the only natural way to climb to the top of Google’s SERP is to serve your intended audience as best as possible. Good SEO and web design practices are merely tools to get there. Fix these common web design mistakes on your own or with a website builder in Brisbane, create helpful content that will add value to your audience, and you should be on your way to that coveted first page.
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