Guest Post Bio:

Jacob Stoops is a 27 year-old SEO Analyst at People To My Site (Columbus, OH). He is also active in Social Media, Web Design, Wordpress, Blogging and more. Follow his SEO & Wordpress blog.

7 Design Flaws that Kill Your SEO

Many times the fate of a website’s search future is determined long before it is ever launched, in what most design firms call the “Planning Stages” or “Kick-Off”. For the sake of this article, imagine yourself sitting in on one of these Kick-Off meetings.

Kick-Off meetings for a design project are often filled with lots of optimism. They are a place where good ideas get passed around, and many design decisions are made. While these events are supposed to be positive, they can also be the place where SEO goes to die!

In the list below, I will detail a few design flaws that are the equivalent of putting a hit out on your website’s searchability:

1. No Text

From a fundamental SEO standpoint, this is probably right up there at the top. The importance of having text on your website is immeasurable. You would be surprised (but I wouldn’t) on how many people miss the boat in this critical area.

Search engines scan the text on your website and use that text as a large deciding factor in where it should rank your website in the search engine results page. Therefore, it is important that you have quality text on your website that talks about what you do, what your site is all about, and/or where you service.

2. Text in Images

If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. Designers placing all the relevant text within a flattened image. Why is this bad, you ask? Because search engines can’t read images on a website.

Images are the proverbial blind spot for the major search engine powerhouses. This means that all that pretty text that you layered on that flattened image isn’t really there in the eyes of the search engines. The only way around this is by using Alt tags on your images.

In short, don’t place your text within images, but place it in the HTML so that it can be scanned. You want to use a font that isn’t web-safe? There are many CSS tricks you can do to use non-web safe fonts. Look them up.

3. Splash Pages

Ughh…splash pages. Splash pages were once a popular design trend (circa 1999), however they are now the bane of every SEO’s existence. The fact that I still see them in use is simply appalling.

What’s the problem? A splash page basically creates an uncrawlable barrier between a webcrawler and your website’s homepage (which is generally your site’s most important and most frequently crawled page). Of course, this is fine if you don’t care about how or if search engines rank your website.

4. Flash

Flash is actually a pretty awesome technology and has its uses, but it wreaks havoc on your SEO-campaign. As of now (although they are getting better) search engines can’t read text within Flash elements.

Therefore, it is not wise (unless you are a well-known brand or only care about cool functionality) to base your entire site in Flash.

What do I recommend? Flash is okay to use, but is best in smaller doses…like your in-laws.

5. Overuse of Dynamic Scripts

Many dynamic scripts such as AJAX act is barriers between webcrawlers and your site’s content. Therefore, if much of your content is populated via dynamic scripting it is likely that much of it will have a hard time getting indexed.

6. Non-Spiderable Navigation

This goes back to dynamic scripts and flash. If your site’s navigation is encased within a dynamic script or flash file, then you might as well bury those links yourself. I’ve heard the Pine Barrows or the Meadowlands are good locations if you don’t want things to be found (pardon the mob reference).

7. Frames

Using frames is probably the worst and most idiotic thing you can do for SEO. It is especially common with auto dealership websites who use third-party sources to frame in their vehicle inventory.

Basically, a frame pulls content in from another website and “frames” it into your site. This means that the content on your site resides on somebody else’s server.

What should you do? Kiss that content or inventory you were hoping to get indexed for goodbye, because it’s not being credited to your site.

Usually, there is nobody there to stop the project from a design destined for failure; HOWEVER we must remember that you’re the fly on the wall here and can try to persuade your team (or the client) to call off the hit.

What do I recommend? Make the decision makers aware of the inherent design flaws and remind them of the common SEO motto, “A beautiful website is worthless if nobody can find it!” If they don’t listen to your persuasive arguments, then I recommend just punching them squarely in the face and screaming bloody murder.

Just kidding! Wait, am I?