Is Your Website Harming Your SEO?
Website design can often be overlooked by businesses that are venturing into the deep, dark world of SEO for the first time. In fact, a lot of businesses with well established websites don’t always understand the need to update their website in order to avoid not ranking well in search engines – but ask an expert digital agency and they’ll tell you just that!
When putting focus on SEO, it’s important to evaluate your website and look for any areas that could be causing harm to current or future search strategies you might have.
Here are 3 things you should look at first:
1. Website Imagery
Images are a great way of selling a product or service to your customers and having some strong imagery on your website is an important design factor, but all images need to be optimised in order to help your SEO rankings.
You can optimise your images by:
- Having descriptive filenames so search engines (and users) can find them.
- Scaling the images to the right size for the space where it will be displayed on your website. This will reduce the overall file size of the image, which will improve the speed of the page.
- Adding caption text for the image where appropriate.
- Including descriptive text of the image in its alt attribute.
2. Conduct a Link Check
Broken links will have a negative impact on SEO.
Take some time to ensure that all the links on your website are working and directing people to where they should. Remove or replace any broken links to avoid losing rank in search engines.
If you are using a content management system like WordPress, consider using a plugin to help. We recommend you check out Broken Link Checker.
Additionally, it’s important to ensure that any old URLs are redirecting people to the right page on any new website design.
3. Remove Duplicate Content
Google likes everything on a website to be unique and fresh. Keep Google and your website visitors happy by ensuring that only original (not duplicated) content is found on your site.
There are a number of great, free online tools that will conduct an analysis of your website and tell you where you’re falling short when it comes to SEO, however if you would like to find out more about how we can help, get in touch with us today for an informal discussion.
