Many businesses in Oxford are making website mistakes that harm SEO and ultimately the success of their business online. While some of these website mistakes are obvious, others are less immediately striking. Websites should be designed for SEO and for users, but many Oxford business websites are falling down on SEO strength.
Here are a few ways you can improve your website to benefit SEO while still retaining a positive user experience.
- Too Large Images and Files
You do need some stunning images to make your Oxford-based website effective. But if they are too large and this is impacting on the site’s load speed it can affect your SEO rankings. You need a page that loads quickly. There are various tests you can carry out on your page to show you if your images are too large.
- Failing to Add H1 Tags
Web design Oxford experts agree that a homepage looks impressive with a great background, clean design, and effective colours. But if there are no H1 tags then the website is missing an important SEO trick. Many businesses don’t put a H1 tag on the page because there doesn’t immediately appear to be a place for it. But you should put it in above the fold, even when your homepage is predominately image-based.
- Irritating Popups
Popups are a big no-no especially on mobile devices, and impact on user experience as well as SEO. Google has issued many warnings over popups and if these are intrusive on your site you could get ranked down.
- Too Much Text in Images
Since text is important for SEO and so are images, surely combining the two will make a positive difference to your Oxford business’s SEO success? Not necessarily, since adding text to an image instead of layering it over the image or putting it separately on the page is not effective for SEO. Search engines will not look at an image and see it like a user will. You might as well not include any text at all in terms of SEO.
- Too Much Scrolling
Scroll is now very popular on websites and it can be very effective, but when you do it incorrectly it can negatively impact on SEO. When you set up scroll to be infinite, meaning that it loads more pages whenever you get to the bottom, you risk not allowing search engines to crawl all these pages. There are, however, strategies that can help your infinite scroll be more SEO-friendly.
All these tips can help you create a user-friendly website that is also fully optimised for SEO. By working on both aspects of a website you increase your business effects.