Redesign To Improve SEO
As a business owner, your success is due in part to how well you can adapt to changes. These changes can show up as new competitors or new products/services to meet changing customer demands. There are also inevitable changes in technology, which includes your business’s website. A professional website should be refreshed and redesigned at a minimum of once every four to five years. Every two to three years is ideal.
Content is king. The more searchable content you have, the better chance a potential customer will find you when doing keyword searches. Updated design techniques are important as well, because a dated website can make your business seem less legitimate.
Below, I’ve provided a couple of big, scary, red flags for consideration. If your current site has any of these items, then it may be time for a redesign.
Websites completely built in Flash
Flash websites are a dying breed. They do not play nice whatsoever with search engines. Flash is an embedded multimedia format, which is not indexed by search engines. In Flash sites, your text is contained within this multimedia format. This makes it almost impossible to have your content scanned and indexed properly. Also, many Flash sites don’t have unique URLs for each individual page within your website. This means it’s impossible for another website to link to a specific page on your site — only your landing page can be linked to. You may have the greatest content in the world, but if search engines can’t find it, and other websites can’t link to it, your website won’t be found. Additionally, Flash does not work on iOS devices (iPhones and iPads). By staying faithful to your Flash website, you are essentially shutting the door on an ever-increasing number of mobile users who want to visit your site.
Websites designed as one big image
This SEO no-no is very similar to why you shouldn’t want a website built with Flash. Text that is located within images is unreadable by search engines. Your website’s style and design might be very attractive, but if all of your text is embedded within your images, search engines will be unable to index that keyword-rich content. Traditionally, the number of HTML-friendly fonts has been limited, but services such as Google Web Fonts and Cufon have recently made it very easy to add search-engine-friendly decorative fonts to your website. Using these fonts does not limit the indexing of your site, and your SEO remains unaffected.
An important thing to remember is that relevant text and specific keywords will help bring new customers to your site. Outdated practices like Flash-based sites and websites that are essentially large image files are detrimental to your current and future online success.
To learn more about how Torx Media can help with redesigning your company’s website, just give us a call at 1-888-867-9633 or contact us below.