Is your website having problems ranking on Google? You know you’ve done everything right; your website is mobile friendly and loads fast on desktop and mobile. You have the right amount of content and your site has been built correctly. Maybe it’s time to contact your web development team to see what’s going on. There might be a little more under the hood that needs to be taken care of. We have compiled a list of potential hidden problems your website might be having. Take a look below to learn how to fix them or ask your web developer about them. KSH can also help if you’re having problems!1. Canonical Errors
What It Is Canonical errors can be very confusing. According the Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, “canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages“. For example, you can have a variety of home page URLs, including www, excluding www, using index.html, or home.asp. Technically all these URLs are different even though they can go to the same content. Google tries to find the best URL available or it canonicalizing the best option. How To Fix You can help Google find the best URL by using the same URLs across the board. If you want www.example.com to be the preferred URL, use that one in all instances. You can also use the rel=”canonical” tag to help the robots crawl the correct pages. A 301 redirect from the other pages to the correge will also be helpful.
2. Take the Guesswork Out
What It Is Confusing layouts may lead guests away from your website. You must keep your audience in mind when designing a website. Remember that something that is easy for you may not be easy for other’s to use. How To Fix Test your website with users before committing to a design. Make sure your navigation is displayed prominently and is easy to follow. Think of a keyword or term that you would find on your website then try to navigate to it on your website as if you have never been to the site before. If you can get there without much work, your website should be easy to navigate. If not, you may want to rethink hur website is layed out.
3. No SEO
What It Is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is what web developers use to make sure your website shows up in the search engines. When KSH builds website they have basic SEO built in so it is easy to build on the basics. How To Fix Here is where you may need to help of a web professional. You can write blog posts, guest posts, clean up directory listings, or gain links. There are many aspects of SEO, one wrong implemation and your website could drop. You need to be careful when performing SEO on your website.
4. Tons of Images
What It Is Images with text is a big no-no. Google cannot crawl images – yet – so if you content is all on your photos you’re website will not be ranked. How To Fix Make sure your images are just that – images. Keep all the text on the page so that Google can actually read it and find your keywords to rank you in the search engine. You can also enhance your images by adding alt tags which will help Google further. Optimize your images to make them load faster to help the website as a whole load faster.
5. Inline CSS
What It Is CSS, or cascading style sheets, are used to help style elements in your website. Usually all the CSS is in an external file that the website calls to. Sometimes the CSS can be displayed inline, or on the page around the element. When this is done too many times it can slow down the website. How To Fix Try to use classes and call to external stylesheets instead of inlining the CSS. Optimize those files to make the website load faster.