4 signs your web designer wrecking your ranking
In today’s vlog I do two site reviews. Both of them seem to be suffering from ignorance of the Googlebot in the design & build. I don’t use the word “ignorance” in a rude way, I use it in a literal sense. The Googlebot has been ignored. Over years I have spoken with several clients who have been surprised that their web designers did not think of Google when the site was being built. In one case a frustrated client told me “when I asked the designer would my new site rank, his response was “Oh you’re going down that path are you” WHAT OTHER PATH WOULD I BE GOING DOWN!” . Just because you understand the business imperatives of your new venture, don’t assume your web designer does.
1. There is very little or no text on your front page – This is typical with major brand sites. There is so much emphasis put on using the right font all the words end up as images rather than text, basically giving Google nothing to read.
2. Heading tags get used as place holders for images – These are your H1s, H2s etc. Google uses these to get information about your content. Presumably words in your headings tell the reader something about the content to follow. If your designer has simply used them to place images in then their relevance is completely lost. This is especially true if actual text Headings are used on the page as well as this further confuses the Googlebot
3. You do a site:mywebsite.com check and it gets weird – How many pages does your site have in the index? If it is way over the amount you think it should be, chances are you have a duplicated content issue or the Googlebot is looking at things it shouldn’t . Either way it shows that the Googlebot has not been thought about.
4. Your page title has none of your keywords or is duplicated. – Thankfully these days I don’t see it as often as I used too but there was a time in the not too distant past that the page title of most sites home pages was either, their web address, their company name or the word “home” . Now we do get to see more keywords in the titles however on some occasions it’s the same title across every page. Page titles should be unique to every page and have keywords in them that relate to the content on that page.
See some solutions and examples in today’s vlog.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
