5 Effective SEO Challenges for Website Developers

Web developers face numerous challenges when developing a website due to ever-changing SEO trends. Additionally, Google and other search engines perform updates on their algorithms to provide users with a great search experience.

This presents new challenges to web owners and web developers. We need to adjust to these changes fast. Failure to do so will result in low ranking in search engines. When seeking SEO Services, you should change your optimization strategies whenever you feel traffic has gone down.

User experience

 

Speed is not the last thing to worry about pertaining to SEO. A responsive design also doesn’t mean you are out of the woods yet. You also need to think about the user experience. This means that your UI should be intuitive and easy to understand.

You need to look at all the angles; from clarity, focused content to navigation, all these elements are vital to any visitor and should be enhanced. Again, I will emphasize on mobile devices. Your design should be touch centered to give mobile users an easy time scrolling and tapping.

Speed also determines your website’s SERPs. Your website will be penalized for having low loading speeds causing Google to slide it down its ranking. The number of crawlers sent to crawl your site will be reduced if your website takes more than 2 seconds to load a page and this is bad news for slow websites. This also means the intended pages to be indexed will reduce tremendously.

AMP Pages 

 

 

This is one of Google’s creations meaning Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It was aimed to help publishers create mobile-optimized content. What makes these pages load faster on mobile devices is their lightweight nature with an easy-to-access framework. The pages give publishers an easy time to improve the speeds of their mobile websites. Creation of these pages is important to all developers wishing to greatly improve on their SEO Strategies.

 

• User Intent

When developing a website, at the back of your mind you should have the user’s intention for the website. Different people have different interests when visiting a website. Put yourself in the user’s shoes and find out what they want to accomplish when visiting a particular site. Reason being, desktops and mobiles have different priorities at the end of the day. Don’t just focus so much on mobile forgetting the purpose of the website. Don’t just wait for Google’s mobile-first index to be announced officially, just get prepared in advance.

 

• Errors brought by Untested JavaScript

A commonly used programming language with object-oriented capabilities JavaScript allows users to interact with the client-side script. Although the concept used in JavaScript sounds simple, it requires a great amount of attention to avoid making mistakes that lead to not working.

 

Low Text-to-HTML Ratio

 

A low text-to-HTML ratio is an indicator that there is a problem with the on-page technical SEO of your site. These problems may include dirty and excessive code that slow down your website, search bots brought by hidden text, excessive flash, inline styling, and Javascript.

Although JavaScript is an awesome programming language, it might end reducing your website speed if handled by a quark. It must be implemented by an expert to reduce the risk of countless errors. To tackle this matter, you can try to move inline scripts to separate files, remove unnecessary code or add necessary on-page text.

 

• Broken Links

For a website with hundreds of pages, it’s normal to have one or two broken links. However, if they are in their dozens, it reduces your website’s credibility and users will doubt your authenticity. Search bots will divert to another website and your important pages won’t be crawled or indexed. This will also affect your page authority negatively. The solution here is to use Google Search Console by clicking  “Crawl Errors” which is under “Crawl” to get information about pages that are returning 404 responses. When you have established the problem, fix it fast to avoid misconception from your visitors.

Duplicate Content

 

Almost 29 percent of online features duplicate content. This is according to research done by Raven tools. Owe to you if you fall in this category because if you are caught up with Google, you might suffer consequences like being penalized or you may not even get ranked on SERP. To counter this issue, try using tools like Siteliner or Copyscape to analyses your content’s originality.

 

• Low Word Count

Websites with few words are not healthy for your SEO. Starving your SEO by having few words on a page or the entire website could kill it. You should have lengthier content that is carefully written in a detailed manner. What many people do is bloat the number of web pages without focusing on quality.

This is referred to as thin content. To avoid thin content, do thorough research on the topic you want to write about so that you can give it enough flesh to accommodate relevant keywords. You can go on to use long-tail keywords or create keywords in form of questions as subheadings. This gives structure to lengthy content as well as enhancing the website’s voice-search appeal. The word count for an ideal blog post should be between 2, 250 – 2, 500.

Substandard Mobile Experience

Since Google has started mobile-first indexing which is slowly being implemented, this will affect you in a big way. This means that it’s now focusing on the mobile version of your website for indexing. Therefore, it is better to prepare early and make your website mobile-friendly to get better ranking.

However, many websites are relaxant in implementing this important requirement. What drives Google to do this is the rapid growth of mobile phone users with the U.S leading with over 300 million smartphone users. You’ll deny 40% of your prospective clients a chance to access your content if it’s not mobile-friendly. You should have done that yesterday if you haven’t!

 

• Missing Alt Tags and Broken Images

Image optimization problems are common. Therefore, before you go ahead and start using images, think of their necessity first. If they are not helping to drive a point home in your website, it’s better to leave them for later. The most prevalent problems facing webmasters are missing alt tags and broken images.

Alt tags refer to the HTML elements of images used to describe the web content. Sometimes an image component may fail to display properly on your website, rendering the alt tag to take over, describing both the content and function. Alt tags also assist keywords by helping crawlers understand the page info better. You can implement alt tags by simply locating the elements of an image in your HTML code and add the alt tag.

 

• Problems in Title Tags

This problematic issue is not only common but also diverse. The major ones are duplicate title tags, too long or too short title tags, and missing title tag. To get rid of this problem, compress the title tags of your current web pages. For example – Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Name of Brand. Giving every page a unique title tag is also a good solution.

Conclusion

Developers face SEO challenges every day, which is quite normal. However, minimizing these issues gives you enough time to focus on productivity rather than rectifying these problems. As much as there are solutions to them, it’s better to tackle them from the beginning to avoid unnecessary expenditure. For the Best SEO Services, seek services from a reputable Web developer or SEO expert.

Author Bio

Naman Modi is a Professional Blogger, SEO Expert & Guest blogger at NamanModi.com, He is an Award Winning Freelancer & Web Entrepreneur helping new entrepreneur’s launches their first successful online business.

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