Elements that Kill your SEO

Design elements on your website that are killing your SEO

How healthy is your site? Now that is one odd question. Your site can look fabulous, seem superbly functional, and yet lack SEO capabilities due to small faults in core codes. The graphic interface of a website is just as important as its core code. Therefore, we have seen websites confident about their HTML codes and CSS formats rank lower than they should. Somewhere, they forget that their website is for human users. Pleasing the bots and the search engines is not enough to secure a good rank.

Did you know, Design elements could become more powerful in dictating your SE rank than your website content? People trust sites exponentially more when the designs were professional. In a recent survey, about 94% of the people visiting a website referenced the design of the site as a cause of their mistrust. Only about 6% referred to the content or the lack of it as their reason for mistrust.

How is your website doing?

Therefore, how many people visit you each day, your bounce rate and your conversion rate, all depend on how your site looks. Just optimizing your content for the search engines and adding lucrative header tags is not enough for ensuring high organic traffic. The graphic design and content of your website should not clash. A children’s website should use fun and easy to use layouts in vibrant colors. Bakery sites usually go for powder blue, baby pink and white combinations, food websites rely heavily on green, orange and yellow tones. The content and your target audience will determine the design of your website. This will directly impact other aspects of your business including branding and sales.

What Google likes right now

Responsive design is something all bots welcome. Your SEO service for small business can create responsive website designs by using generous doses of CSS 3 with your HTML 5 code. You will need a little bit of knowledge regarding coding to turn your desktop site mobile friendly. However, if you are creating a mobile-friendly site from the top, you can directly go for templates that create websites for all devices. Very recently, Google has announced their intention to introduce an index between mobile users and desktop users for 2017. Along with the AMP project, this gives a clear indication of Google favoring responsive sites over static sites.

Our website design needs to reflect your brand, business policies and it should resonate with your audience. Thinking long-term is often beneficial for your business. Going by the latest trends may create more hoopla, but thinking of brand value building through website design is one way to make your online presence last longer.

Traditional is good

Always remember, when it comes to website designing – stick to the traditional schemes. The moment you shift from a traditional HTML-based website design, you are raising some obvious red flags with the Google bots. They are more accustomed to crawling regular sites, with regular core codes, with a dose of CSS and a nice slathering of SSL certifications. The best option for the smart builder is parallax design or parallax scrolling. WordPress has made Parallax more or less their monopoly. Search engines may have some initial trouble following this design, but it is more than just a fleeting trend. It looks like Parallax is here to stay. It creates a continuity that most of your users will like.

Design for the future

While making certain graphic design changes to your site, you need to remember that this is the time for AI. RankBrain is already in action, and it is the fourth most important factor for Google ranking. Designing for people and bots were the talk of the past. Now you need to think about designing for the future or the AI. Google is soon going to merge their current image recognition and SER technology with RankBrain. Here are a few factors that will affect SEO then –

• Websites with a great design that appeals to all judges will get an immediate boost.
• Relevant images with ALT tags and high-quality images will get the right boost.
• Alt Tags will need to be more specific. You need to be able to describe the purpose and content of the image via its Alt tag.
• Google may directly penalize deceptive images, deceptive content (this includes incorrect use of keywords) and author profiles.
• “Shop by image” function is on its way. This will revolutionize the e-commerce market. Similar to the “search by image” function, it will allow users to shop for highly specific or visually similar products.

If you want good traffic, invest in a good website design. Looks, layout, and content will determine a huge part of your SEO. Codes may be THE factor, which determines a site’s optimization, but looks do matter, says Drew Hendricks in Forbes.

Author bio: Vivian Green is an analyst with the leading SEO service for small business in the city. She has worked with the leaders of the industry and found the secrets to Google’s ranking system.