While Search Engine Optimisation continues to increase in importance, there are still some website designers that don’t know how to utilise it. Designers must realise the prominence of search engine usage and learn how to use it or risk being left behind with the rest of the dumb designers. Here’s a few big mistakes that should not appear in modern website design.

Flash Failures in website design

It is important to understand how search engine web spiders work. These spiders are similar to a text-based browser and cannot read embedded text. While many designers like the look of flash menus and graphics, you should never embed your main menus or target keywords in flash graphics or images. The search engine spiders will not be able to follow your links and will skip over your content.

Title Tagging Tragedy

Although good website designers know that each page should have its own unique title tag with target keywords, this is one of the most common mistakes in website design today. When you provide the same or similar title tags for the entire website, you are basically telling search engines that every page on the site refers to the same content and that none are more unique than any other.

Designers should also watch out for the 65 character limit when writing title tags. In a search engine results page, the title tag provides the link heading. That means that you only have around 65 characters including spaces before you risk getting cut off.

While you should try to place your target keywords into your title tag, you should also be careful not to over-stuff the tag. Saying the exact same things three times won’t make you any more relevant, and search engines look at keyword stuffing in the title tag as spam. Just use the common sense rule and write a professional-sounding tag.

Splash Page Stumbles

Many website designers and developers love splash pages, but most don’t realise the harm that these pages cause on their site’s SEO strategy. The homepage of a site is usually the highest ranking page and should see substantial spider crawling. Internal pages won’t appear in the search engine without the proper linking structure for the spider to follow. Splash pages don’t meet the requirements.

Most designers place a large banner image with a “click to enter” link on the bottom of the page. While this is bad enough, embedding the enter link in the image is even worse because it makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.

Website designers have an array of great tools at their disposal, but sometimes they can get carried away with elements and forget about overall effectiveness. Your awesome new website won’t do much good if no one visits it. By adopting a great SEO strategy, you can bring in more viewers and enjoy the benefits of a successful website. Just make sure that your web designer has a good understanding of your goals. Check their work to make sure that they aren’t committing some of these common mistakes.