Website designing is a tricky yet useful topic. You visit quite a few websites daily, some of which are well designed and properly structured, whereas some of them may have poor layout and design. This article will brief you about some of the most common web design mistakes and also offer you solution on how can you avoid these simple errors. Remember, a good website design consisting of rich and informative text can do wonders for a website and will help to boost your search engine rankings, whereas on the other hand a poor web design will not only lower your search engine rankings but also tarnish image from the minds of the customer.
1. Meta Description More Than 150 Characters
Meta descriptions are one of the most important parameter for drawing the traffic from search engines. Similar to page titles, Meta descriptions will get reduced if they are too long.
Fix:
You must device Meta descriptions of your web page which is quite detailed and has reference to your page titles; however it shall not be more than 150 characters.
2. Page Title not Targeting Keywords
It’s a must that the title of the web page must match the terms that are used in search engines. Avoid too much advertisement in the title itself and it should be more related to the topic. You should also avoid the use of unnecessary descriptive keywords as the users don’t look for them. The initial words are most important in search engine results. For the users, the keywords are more important than the name of the brand and thus only realistic keywords must be used in the page title.
Fix:
You should look for the words that the user uses for searches. For this you can take help of the various analytical tools. You should then adjust the page title according to these keywords and make them more readable.
3. Page Title More Than 70 Characters
Page title is what you seen on the top of the window. The title tells about the visitor what’s there in the page. As the search engine spiders cut off the title of your page if it’s too long, thus you should try to limit it under 70 characters.
Also, in term of SEO it’s recommended that you should keep the title concise. If the title of the page is quite long, it will also dilute the importance of the title.
Fix:
You should think of a concise title which must be rich in the keywords.
4. Domain Name Expiring Soon
Search engine spiders favor those websites that are not going to expire for a much longer time. If you get a domain name registered for next few years, it shows the commitment and also implies that your website is not a spam or hoax.
Fix:
You should always make a point to renew the domains which cost just around $10-20 per year for a good boost in SEO.
5. Images without ALT Text
It’s a critical point. Search engine doesn’t have any algorithm to read the images. They just scan the images primarily for text. However, you can take advantage of the ALT tag. This tag can be used for association with the image. Even though the effectiveness of ALT text on the keywords of the page is minimal, you must still have it for better results.
Fix:
You should put ALT tag on the pictures you have on the web page. You can also add captions that are followed to your HTML.