Next Digit, Inc.

Search Engine Friendly Web Designs:

Very often business owners are in such a hurry to establish their presence on the web that they hire inexperienced web designers to create their websites, which are often not SEO-friendly. Establishing a presence on the web is not an easy task. It is not enough to put up a simple online presence and your website, which usually costs thousands of dollars, will not work to your advantage if it is not SEO-friendly. We at NEXT DIGIT emphasize the importance of an SEO-friendly website design so that our clients will get the most of their internet investment. A poorly designed website will get buried under hundreds of thousands of websites that compete for the same customers. Getting visitor traffic to your website is one thing but turning these visitors into customers is a different story.

Here are the top 10 common mistakes that web designers commit that you should watch out for:

1. The use of frames

Using frames is an antique coding method that results in extremely poor rankings. Web crawlers have difficulty in rating such sites and these usually do not turn up in search engine results.

1. JavaScript Navigation

Web crawlers do not use javascript. As a result, drop down links and other navigation tools are ignored and are not scored.

1. Complete Flash Website

Search engines cannot comprehend information presented in Flash. As a result, information stored in these types of files are not accounted for when search engine ranks are compiled.

1. Session IDs

Duplicate content issues arise with the use of session IDs due to the individual assignment of each ID. Because of this, a website will get extremely negative ratings.

1. Poor URL Structure

Search engine crawlers find it extremely difficult to read the dynamic nature of multiple variable URLs. This usually results into pages failing to index.

1. Hidden Text

The use of hidden text is against search engine guidelines and websites found to be using this black hat tactic face immediate disbarment from all search engine results, quashing your internet investment completely.

1. Duplicated Content

Some lazy web designers resort to copy and paste practices.  This practice does no good for your site because search engine crawlers will drop website rankings of pages with too similar content or identical web structure. Quality SEO vs. website design will address these issues immediately.

1. Not enough deep links

The lack of external links to outside web pages will cause websites to bottom out and drop from search engine results in a span of two months. For search engine crawlers, a website that does not have enough outside links and references mean a lack in quality and will result to a drop in results.

1. Too many graphics

Websites with too many graphics have dismal rankings because such graphics slows down the loading speed, resulting to information that is unaccounted for.

1. Unreliable servers/hosts

Spotty web connections and unreliable hosts will affect your ratings especially if headers return as 200 Ok headers or 404 Not Found for removed or deleted pages.