Building a website from a developer point of view is an endeavor that needs to be handled with extra caution. A single blunder with the design may considerably destroy your SEO ranking by reducing it. It is great to try new things and reuse old design techniques but taking SEO issues smartly. There is no need of incorporating certain functionality in your website and not knowing that it can bring down the SEO effort that you had put or not. When building a site, many things are put into check such as usability, interaction, complexities and compatibilities just to mention. The site must be made in such a way that visitors are lured by their instincts into more exploration of that site. This can only be achieved when the site favors their eyesight. Take a look at the following 7 Design blunders that can haunt your SEO efforts and how to fix them.

1. Use of Splash Pages

Using contents that are hidden by splash pages gives search engines such as Google and Bing an obstacle. They may choose not to try reading content that is already hidden. The Java Splash page may favour your own eyesight but it will take away visitors glance. Don’t use them. Using splash pages has been considered to be one of the tools that erect a barrier between you and the search engine. Google cannot read Java hence you MUST not use them if you don’t want to hurt your SEO achievement.

2. An all-Java Site

Building a site that is completely developed using Java has often been associated with someone trying to talk to a brick wall. If you have a site made purely with Java, search engines will have a hard time trying to locate the content. This will automatically lead to poor or wrong indexing. Think about a site that has no links, keywords and no sitemap. The best trick to deal with this design blunder is to quit using Java in a website design.

3. Use of Frames

This is another annoying thing to use in a website design. They not only appear atrocious visually but they also give search engines a hard time to locate the content. There is no objection that you have a nicely written content for your site. Using this old fashion frames will doom the content non-findable because it can be indexed properly by search engines. The problem with frames is that it uses 3 types of html files unlike a site that does not have frames uses one html file. This creates an inevitable issue with search engines because it becomes difficult to read the content. Avoid wrong indexing by Google by just staying away from frames.

4. Improper Use of Images

A site should never use images as the main tool used in navigation. The design should explore both texts and images for navigation. For example, using images as background with texts above and spicing them with Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) will do great. Emphasizing on images alone will make Google forget that it must not only admire the images but needs to understand them as a link. You can also learn more about image optimization that can improve your ranking. 

5. Over Using Images

If you site is entirely made of images, it will take time before the whole page is completely loaded. Multiple use of visual elements slow down the crawling process hence the time taken to load an entire page does not favor the visitor. It is advisable to use tools such as speed in sights facilitated by Google to improving the loading process.

6. Not Using Text in Header

Header tags help in site mapping making the content to be indexed properly by search engines. For example, the h1 tag plays a role of informing search engine that that is the most important content in that page. It is no wonder keyword is always included in this heading. The h2 tag has content for h1 and h3 is a continuation of h2 hence they must be used all the time in content.

7. Using Popups

Popups do suck. There is no doubt that this obnoxious design technique is always blocked by smart browsers. No need to infuriate search engines and web users by using popups. Users will always block them while Google and other search engines will not index them. Just avoid using it.

Author Bio:

Allan is an online manager for Cjponyparts – cj pony mustang clutch. He like to blog on various online strategies that are related to SEO, PPC & Lead Generation.