Designing a new website is an exciting time for business owners as they can create a site that is user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing. While you may be anticipating a boost in traffic, you may actually fall off the first page ranking due to poor SEO practices. Rather than focusing solely on the color scheme and graphics, every website must incorporate SEO best practices to ensure their website ranks high in SERPs. Below are a few common mistakes that can negatively affect your website.
No Alt Text/ Flash-Based Images
If your images are too large they could alter your website’s loading time which can lead to a high bounce rate. Users don’t want to sit and wait for your website load. Additionally, Flash images could prevent mobile-users from viewing your website and if your images aren’t optimized then the search engines can not read and index them.
Neglecting Critical Content
Writing keyword-rich content for your audience (in a natural tone) is crucial when it comes to boosting your rankings. Make sure to include your meta titles & descriptions as well.
Blocking Search Engines
When a website launch goes awry, this is usually because the robot.txt file was set to block search engines. Perhaps you’ve put firewalls up to block site crawlers.