Publicity is important for increasing the flow of traffic to your website and this is referred to as search engine optimization (SEO). However, there are some features that can negatively affect your site’s ranking and prevent search engines from indexing your web pages correctly.
In this post we will focus on some concrete website design elements of not for profit web design that are known to affect SEO in a negative way. That is why it is crucial to be aware of these outcomes as not to create a site architecture that works against findability and rankings.
Overly Complicated URLs
The URL of each of your web page is a sort of a message to the search engines as to the content present on that particular page. For this reason, long, language-complicated URLs, including many query strings, special characters, and unnecessary subdirectories, complicate the process of search engine understanding the given page.
Instead, create specific and engaging URLs that integrate users and SEO keywords into the URL strings. For instance, www.website.com/services/social-media-marketing is more comprehensible than www.website.com/?pageID=87374.
Thin Content Pages
Thin content refers to pages that offer a bare minimum of value, information, or differentiation from other content – and it weakens your site’s overall quality signals.
For instance, a blog page with two sentences of text or products with descriptions with minimum text tell the search engines that your site does not have the expertise.
If you give the users valuable and useful information and incorporate keywords in your content on every page, you want the search engines to consider your site as an authoritative site to rank for those terms.
Redacting “Crawl Budget”
Some search engines assign a ‘crawl budget’ in order to determine the number of pages of a particular site that can be crawled in each pass, according to the relevance of the pages.
This is particularly true if your site structure allows for an infinite number of pages, has many pages behind logins, or allows users to create an infinite number of pages like image galleries, forums, and catalogs, etc.
All these can use up search engine crawl budget before getting to the important parts of your site. In essence, avoid creating too complex information architecture, avoid generating low-value pages dynamically.
Broken Internal Linking
Carefully structuring internal links with the help of best nonprofit websites to cross-reference related content pages on your website provides two SEO dividends: first, it assists the search bots to crawl as well as index your pages correctly.
Second, it shares the ‘link juice’ from your most authoritative pages to extend ranking power across the entire site. However, internal links that lead to other pages within the website and are broken or the famous ‘404 error’ is a sign of bad signal to the search engines about the quality of the website.
With the help of proper internal linking and checking for broken links as you continue to add or remove pages on your site, you are able to achieve proper crawlability and link equity.
Images, Video, Audio (Heavy Reliance)
Although using multimedia content to attract the visitors, the excessive use of the images, videos, audio, PDFs or some other formats other than the HTML makes it difficult for the search engine to understand the context and the relevance of the specific web page.
Specifically, search crawl bots are still not very sophisticated in terms of the comprehension of the content embedded in the media elements and therefore if your page relies on such elements primarily, search engines will not be able to quickly understand what specific utility your pages bring to the table.
Conclusion
The desire to attain a high rank in the search results may appear to conflict directly with the goal of building a visually appealing site that engages the user – but it does not have to.
By optimizing every single aspect of your informational architecture, URL structure, content quality, internal linking, and the use of multimedia, you can build a site that caters to both visitors and search bots.
This way you shed light on the five SEO hazards described above and ensure easier and more effective indexing and ranking, as well as higher visibility of your online destination.
