10 Common Design Errors | Calgary-Internet-Marketing

What are the 10 things your website designer won’t tell you?

Many website owners think their websites are working just the way they should and that the website is not the reason they fail to get qualified leads from the Internet. This is especially true when these 10 common mistakes are influencing their thinking about website design and performance. The 4 Steps to Internet Success need to be addressed effectively by correcting these errors.

I recently reviewed a professionally designed website and found these important website design flaws had been overlooked and were having a significant impact on the owner’s conversion potential. It resulted in a website that would not benefit the business owner at all. No matter how inexpensive that site ultimately was, it was not worth the investment made.

Here are 10 common mistakes you need to check for in your website design to evaluate your Internet marketing strategy and your potential to succeed online. if they are present in your site, an adjustment is required to improve you online performance.

1. Improper Domain Name Selection:

Many companies wrongly choose a domain name that represents their branding. The thinking is that visitors will search for their business or recognize the company name when they see it in a search. This is an old way of thinking in a modern system that simply does not work that way. Marketing companies who create magazine ads, brochures and a wide variety of advertising materials for their clients may treat a website design as another branding piece and assume that having the company name or a person’s name as the URL will be beneficial. This is a serious error in Internet marketing. Here are some reason why it doesn’t work that way.

Consider that the people who search for your company or your name (as in the case of a real estate agent) must already know who you are. If not they would not do a search using your name. They may have seen your name in an ad, on a sign , or been given a business card. If that is true, your domain name is probably included in the marketing material and accessible to them no matter what it is. If you are not including your website address in you advertising you need to begin right away since statistics show us that most business transactions today begin with some sort of online research before a contact is ever made.

The people you want to find you by searching are the people who don’t know your company name. These people are searching for information. Ultimately they are looking to answer some question about a product or service that you offer. If you have designed your website to provide solutions to those questions, you will become a valuable asset. But first you have to be found and the people looking for answers do not type in company names in searches when they do not know your company has the solution. They use common keywords and industry related phrases when using search engines. If your domain name contains some of those industry keywords, the chances of your site showing up on page one of Google are much higher than if you use your company name. This is especially true if your target market is local and searching within your city or region.

SEO Solutions: Do some keyword research and get a new domain name that uses industry keywords and phrases and whenever possible use a “.com” before any other category. (Back To Top)

2. Company Name Presented as Graphics

Website designers often create a text image of your company name and logo. There are some good reason for doing this from a website design perspective, but from a search engine optimization viewpoint this is very bad. From the designer’s perspective it requires less skill to add an image to your website whenever your name is required. In addition, some fonts are not common to webs browsers and will alter the look of the logo or brand appearance. So they add an image and the appearance problem is resolved. Once again this is not effective thinking in the virtual world. It is designed to simplify the work the designer must do, not get your site to perform as a lead generating tool that benefits your business strategy.

Search engines cannot currently interpret the text in an image so your company name is invisible if presented as in a graphic. Since you want people who do know your name to be able to type it into a search engine to find you, the name has to be in written in text on your site and often enough to become search engine friendly. This is especially true if you are applying rule number 1 above and using an effective domain name that does not include you company name. While adding the tag to include your company name improve performance slightly, it does not have the same impact as using real text in a header, page title or other search friendly form.

SEO Solutions: Your website should be built by a web design company that understands how search engines work. Your designer should be able to design your site using modern methods that include CSS style sheets that can modify the text and positioning of content so that it looks good and performs well in the search engines. Your designer needs to build your website so that the industry keywords and business name and market branding efforts are considered in the layout and design of the site and avoid the use of “text graphics” for company names and catch phrases. (Back To Top)

3. Ineffective Page Titles

Consider going into a bookstore and seeing row upon row of books with different covers and different content. You decide to buy a book about your favourite topic and when you look at the titles of all the books they say “Home” or “About us” or “Contact Us” . Initially you would not know what the book was about unless you opened it up to read the first few pages. Now ask yourself. When is the last time you searched for information on the Internet and used the search term “home”?

When search engines index websites, they read the titles of the the pages. Then they compare the contents of the pages to those titles. The problem is that search engine website analysis software, while very advanced, cannot actually think like a human being. It does not know when or how to ignore a weakness in a title. When the relationship between content of the pages of your website and the title of your pages are not relevant to each other, the rank of the website decreases.

SEO Solutions: Rename the titles of all your pages to include industry keywords that are used as search terms by potential customers. For example if you are in the auto repair industry you home page could be “auto repair” and your services page could be renamed ” auto service”. (Back To Top)

4. Improper Image File Naming

Certainly everyone appreciates a great looking graphically designed website. We see them them all the time. This is especially true in some industries such as automobile or real estate sites although it is common in every industry. New home builders and renovators and many real estate industry related websites are built with Flash and high quality images designed to convince the visitor that the company represented is professional and capable of beautiful workmanship. Web design or graphic design companies want to display their handiwork and beautiful images of completed projects are a logical addition.

The problem is that at the moment, as previously mentioned in error number 2, Google cannot interpret graphics as qualifiers for a website. So determining its rank as being the best solution for a keyword search such as ” Calgary Homes” or “Auto Painting” with reference to the local internet market is not going to benefit from images.

The Internet is still very much a text based medium. Compounding that is the mistake that many web developers make by naming images ” image 1″ or ” istock_123456″ or something totally unrelated to the content of the website itself.

SEO Solutions: There are 2 simple improvements you can make to this situation. Name you images with effective keywords like “Auto_Painting1″ or ” Graphic_Design2″ and use the tags. tags can be filled with keywords like ” photo of a new home for sale in Calgary”. All these will improve the results you get from search engines. (Back To Top)

5. Poor Navigation Systems

One of the most common mistakes I see on websites are the methods used to create your menu items. There are so many variations of this error that explaining what to look for is complicated. The basic premise is this. Search engines behave like people. The spiders (web crawlers) that index your site to determine whether it contains the kind of information that people are looking for follow the same navigation routes that people do. The menu bar or sidebar that contains the list and that links to your pages has to be search engine friendly for them to crawl your pages. If the spiders don’t see the content in all your pages, your rank will be affected negatively.

Once again the use of images like buttons, and JavaScript that changes the images from one to another creates a roadblock to the search engines. It cannot be read unless the text is separate from the graphic image. Lots of automated “build your own website” programs, and many website designers use these menu formats because they look good and are easy to create. The problem is they are really ineffective for search engine optimization. You have to use a format that allows the menu items to display the text. CSS is one way to do that so make certain your web designer knows how to use Style Sheets to build your menu bar.

SEO Solutions: Avoid graphic images as menu items. Include text in your links and use keywords as menu items. Note that the home page of this website is “Internet Marketing” and not “Home”. Use a WordPress website. WordPress websites automatically create search engine friendly menu bars like the ones in this highly optimized website. (Back To Top)

6. Using Image Alt Tags Ineffectively

Some search engine optimization experts tell us that the tag is no longer being used by search engines to index your site for ranking purposes. While we never know for certain what the search engine developers are doing to improve the system to make their searches more accurate, we do know that some people with disabilities who search the web are not able to see your pages. Instead they use audio tools to read the content of your website out loud using words that make sense is required. This is why the tag was originally created. To assist the visually impaired or perhaps people who can’t see clearly to browse the Internet and get the information they are looking for.

When you use the tag on your images the browser reads the name of the image and this is then said aloud by the computer. If you don’t use top quality descriptions of your images you are not taking the disabled into consideration. In addition if you happen to add a few quality keywords into the tag, you may even get the benefit of increasing your keyword count and improving your page rank on the search engines. It used to be common practice,

SEO Solutions: Place you mouse over all the images on your website. If the image doesn’t display effective and descriptive words describing the image you will know that the tags are not being used properly. Ask your website developer to add or change them to create more effective terms and descriptions where necessary. (Back To Top)

7. More Ineffective Navigation Methods

We’ve covered how important the menu items in your website are when search engines are indexing the pages and how naming the pages poorly can effect your page rank. Another common error web owners (and designers) make is using menu text that is not optimized for the search engines. For example you may want to have a “services” page where you list and describe all the services your business can provide to your customers. Normally most website designers will add the term “Services” to the menu bar and link it to a single page listing the services and a description of each service with a title.

Since very few people search the Internet looking for “services” you should use descriptive words in all your menu items to link to all your pages. For example in our site we use “internet marketing services” as the menu item. These are the words that most people would use to find out type of services. We could have used “internet consulting services” but consulting is a less commonly used term. In addition you describe all your services on your site in separate pages and have each one named in your navigation bar and even have some links to other pages from within your service pages to increase the link count. This will give more validity to your website as a source of information that the search engines are trying to present to visitors using your keywords.

SEO Solutions: Name your links to services, products and information about your company with effective and descriptive words to increase search engine optimization results. (Back To Top)

8. Failure to Use Heading Tags

One of the most important aspects of your website when being ranked by search engines is the value of important text and phrases in the headings of your pages or your paragraphs. Search engines assume that text that is highlighted in some form or another must be more important than other text. When you consider the fact that many pages and some articles in a page start with the topic title, it is easy to understand that the search engines would consider it valuable.

Many web designer simply use a larger font or bold text to emphasis the words, but search engines don’t consider font size or even bold text to be more important. However there are 2 methods to increase the value of these titles. The first is the use of header tags. If you look at the source code of you web pages, you should see emphasized text surrounded by “H1 to H6″tags. Actually these tags can be numbered right throughor higher. Your web browser has built in instructions for what size the text will be and the keyword value and the size of he text increases the smaller the number is. H1 is larger than H2 and so on.

Often website developers or website owners will use the bold tags to highlight important text and keywords. While it appears heavier in weight, it actually does not get ranked as any more important than regular text by the search engines. The alternative is to use the ” Strong” tags as the words they emphasize are considered more important by search engines. One of the aspects of using WordPress as a CMS for building your website that shows how the developers of this application understand search engine optimization is that when you use the B function to emphasize text in a WordPress website, it automatically uses the tags instead of the tags creating more value in these words for search engine indexing.

SEO Solutions: Always us the “H1 to H6″ or any other sized Header tags to emphasize keywords in your page headers and paragraph or article titles to increase keyword values. Include the “strong “tag to emphasize phrases or sentences that are keyword rich. (Back To Top)

9. Improper Usage of Flash for Website Development

This is one of the most disturbing errors that clients make when buying or having a website designed. Adobe Flash is a multimedia design tool used to create high quality video productions and animations. A few years ago a scripting language was created which added to the power of Flash as a website design tool. It allowed the addition of menus items and many other interactive mouse effects to web pages that were developed around the Flash platform. These site were graphically appealing and extremely visually effective. Many companies looking to create an impressive marketing program that included high quality imagery combined with advanced menu styling invested significant amounts to have the “best looking website” in their industry. This is especially true of industries like new home builders, interior designers and of course art related businesses.

While these sites do stand out as visually appealing and unique in their navigation capabilities, there is a significant search engine optimization concern. That concern is simply that they are practically invisible to search engines. While meta tags may be added in some case by a concerned or more educated developer, the fact is they have little to no impact in getting position on search engines. The key to search engine success is content, and content is king to search engines. Flash sites combine all the design features that you have been warned about in this document because they are graphically structured movies embedded in scripts that simply do not provide keywords to search engines.

SEO Solutions:Avoid using Flash as your website development platform. Do not create a Flash home page or splash page. Flash movies should be limited to highlighting your products or services and should be included only as a component inside pages that are designed specifically for that purpose. (Back To Top)

10. Poorly Designed Home Pages

Every website has a home page. It is the page that visitors land on when the type in your domain name. All websites require one page that is the index page or default page for web browsers to go to when the domain is requested. Early websites were designed with a graphically appealing “splash page” designed to announce the website and catch the eye of visitors. Many webs developers still create splash pages with a focus on graphic design or (as discussed in error #9) a Flash format.

While these pages are visually appealing, once again I must stress that graphics are not effective for search engine optimization. That is why so many websites that actually perform well are filled with text that is keyword heavy and gets right to the information people are searching for. The magazine structure of website design has become popular in the past few years as more and more blogs have become leaders in search engine results for many topics.

In order to convert visitors from passers by to potential clients and ultimately to customers and friends, your home page needs be more than just “another pretty face”. Nobody ever begins a web search with the idea that they are looking for ” the best looking website” when seeking answers to questions or trying to find a product or service. That is why the Internet is called the “Information Highway”.

SEO Solutions: Your homepage needs to be balanced with a professional look, content that shows that you have answers, navigation tools that simplify finding information and a conversion point that allows visitors to interact with you at any time they decide to. (Back To Top)