If you are working to make a web site SEO friendly, page ranking is not the only test – view the pages on different devices to see how they lock and load.
Some sites take a lot longer to load than others and discourage visitors from reading the content.
Helping web visitors find you site only to see them leave again in double quick time seems a waste of time and money, but some web masters unintentionally do their best to put off their visitors.
Besides page ranking, check out your page bounce rates in the web analytics.
Bounce rates are a good indicator of poor content or slow loading pages – visitors who come and stay for just a few seconds are leaving because they are not getting what they want from the site.
The main page ranking offenders leading to high bounce rates are:
- Flash intros
- Embedding text as images
- Images too large and taking too long to load
Flash intros have little point other than a web designer trying to impress. The intro has no SEO value and simply delays the time a visitor has to wait to enter the site.
Embedding text as images has some merits as an infographic – but the content should be repeated in the same article as text to gain SEO page ranking value.
Web sites that embed tables and data as images miss out on the SEO value of the content.
Just remember search engines cannot read text on images.
Large images also have their merits – in photographic, art or image topic sites – but all too often web masters badly lay out pages with images that break the content flow. A bad or unnecessary image is still a bad or unnecessary image, even if it’s big.
Better to have a thumbnail or smaller image with a ‘click to enlarge’ link for visitors who might want to view the image scaled up.
Instead of filling up that valuable space with objects that do not contribute to page ranking, work harder at providing solid text content that registers with a search engine.
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