You’ve seen those sites, you know, the websites that look like they are from the Netscape days of 1996 on a 56k modem? While we may remember those days and enjoy reminiscing, it’s important to do what is best for your business, so if you’ve got any of these ancient relics hanging around on your website, get rid of them! Some of these elements can affect your SEO, even if indirectly (user satisfaction…). They can all negatively affect your conversion rateas well.

1. Old School Ads – Banner Ads and Adsense

Before you jump the gun too much, let me say my main emphasis here is two-fold: ugly ads, and too many of them. Google actually looks at websites and devalues pages which have too many ads on them. It is important to make your ads fill in natural spaces (general to one side of the content or below the content). You might also have a single banner ad (wait, I’ll explain soon) across the top above the navigation menu. Another reason for avoiding too many ads and ugly ads? Users. People generally don’t like ads. One thing I hate is AdSense ads (text only) which appear in the middle of content and are styled to match the site. I could accidentally click on it thereby costing the advertiser money and making money for that deceptive site owner. Don’t be that guy! Why might you still have banner ads? Because they are still very relevant and have high conversions, as long as they’re not ugly. Any banner that’s too flashy, in colors and/or motion, shouldn’t be on your site. Some ads are becoming more relevant as media companies become more aware of who is on their site (tracking cookies, re-marketing, social network data, etc.), but by and large, people resist advertising, and by extension: the site upon which the ads appear.

2. Narrow Width

Another child of the late 90s is narrow spacing. One of the goals of a web designer is for the design to be viewable on most devices. In the 90s, this included mostly 800×600 resolution CRT monitors. Today it is recommended that your website be responsive. This means your site is designed to adjust to the screen size of the user. In addition to CRT monitor relics, we now have retina displays, iPhones, iPads, and a smorgasbord of Android and other devices to which we must cater. Building a responsive site means your website doesn’t need to recognize the device type so much as displays the content based on the screen size. Not a bad way to go if you ask me, and likely the future of the web anyway.

3. Tables

Once upon a time, websites were structured using tables. This enabled quicker design and helped us maintain code which didn’t look like spaghetti. As time went on other more effective methods for structuring content emerged and tables began to disappear. Modern coding techniques allow for more flexible design than do tables. Search engines can read tables just fine, but tables tend to make your site look really box-like and very 1995. If your site looks like it’s from the mid-nineties, your visitors may think the content is too. If you’d like to shed some weight in your code, check out this post. Tables tend to bulk up the code more than is necessary, so it’s worth looking at! 

4. Splash Page

A splash page is a page which appears before the home page will load. Users generally need to click on an “Enter Site” button of sorts. There are at least 5 billion reasons to never have a splash page, but I’ll keep it short and just cover a few:

1. They are most useful for a new visitor to your site (but not all new visitors will appreciate it). But most of your revenue and ongoing use (hopefully) is also going to include returning visitors. If you make them go through that annoying splash page every time, they are less-likely to want to return.
2. Some new visitors won’t look around or care to click another button, and you’ll lose new visitors right on the splash page.
3. It adds another layer through which search engines have to crawl. The more difficult you make your site, the less likely it is to be crawled and fully indexed.

Moral of the story: don’t have a splash page because they’re pretty lame.

5. Static HTML Sites

Of course you’re going to have static content, including static HTML. What I’m advocating against is having sites hard-coded from static HTML, like they used to do in the nineties. You wanna know why?I’ll tell you why:

1. You won’t keep your site up-to-date. You’re not going to want to go in and code HTML just to update things. Trust me on this (been there done that!). You’ll have to train someone in your organization to do or hire someone to do it if you’re delegating to someone else, and that’s just a pain. Don’t do it.
2. You won’t be able to roll out cool new features or integrate with social media as easily. If you use a popular CMS such as WordPress, you’ll have access to code (plugins, scripts, themes, etc.) that thousands of other people are writing for you… often for free. That sounds better than reinventing the wheel, doesn’t it?
3. With content management systems like WordPress available for free, there’s no good excuse not to have a CMS. Any reputable web host will give you free access to a MySQL database, so you really don’t need to worry about that being an issue anymore.
4. You’ll be able to manage on-site SEO much easier with a CMS like WordPress than on a static HTML site. With a static site you’ll have to do every little thing manually, whereas WordPress with a couple plugins can do most everything you need. (hat tip: I wrote this how-to post in July about optimizing a WordPress site).

6. Dynamic URL Structure

This is one of those unpardonable sins. I know you want to track everything, like how people get to other pages on your site, but if you’re tracking using a dynamic URL structure, stop it! Here are some fantastic reasons:

1. Users don’t like it. When searching, users are more likely to click on a URL that says what the page is, than a string of seemingly random characters. They feel safer doing so because they have an expectation of what they’ll find.
2. Search engines generally don’t like dynamic URLs, because they can’t keep current URLs in their index if they change, and it can create issues of duplicate content. This means the search engine thinks you have multiple pages with the same content on them because the URL appears unique to the search engine. That’s a bad thing.

Moral: use a static URL structure (really easy to do in WordPress!). If you can’t do that (such as with a complex e-commerce site), check out this post on URL structure.

7. Flash

Around these parts, Flash is a dirty word. Not only do search engines generally not like Flash, people generally don’t either. What? Crazy? Here’s what: people who are still mentally stuck in the web of the early 2000s (maybe late nineties even) may think Flash is good because it’s flashy, flexible, and seems really cool. But here’s the reality:

1. Search engines don’t like Flash because they can’t parse its content, or it’s still difficult to do so.
2. People hate Flash because sites still built using Flash often have auto-play features like music which are terribly frustrating when you’re hunting around for the pause/stop button.
3. Despite what you might think, people don’t enjoy browsing sites that have lots of moving pieces, flashing content, etc. They like something that is easy on the eyes, easy to read, and that doesn’t distract them while they’re looking at the content they want to view.
4. Flash doesn’t work on iOS devices like the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, and despite what Android advocates claim, the user experience of Flash on Android is quite dismal. Many of the newer Macintosh computer models and likely other future Mac updates do not support Flash at all. So why would you want to essentially block 20% of the internet from accessing your site?

The one exception to this is video. Video is generally still used in Flash players, however, I always recommend that you use an HTML 5 player which can deliver video in multiple formats. If you just use a Flash player, 20% or more of the internet won’t be able to see your videos. With a proper player like YouTube’s latest embed code (which uses iFrames), it will recognize the device and serve up a format compatible with the device. Stay up-to-date with modern design and code standards and you should be just fine.  Users expect what they are used to, and the better user experience you can deliver, the better you’ll convert them into customers.

Google algorithms generally follow standards and best practices as well. Forget the naysayers and do what’s best for your customers (which does include SEO… make it easy to find you!). Are there any other web design practices of yesteryear you’d like to call out? Anything you’d like to add? Don’t be shy! Share in the comments. A little healthy discussion never hurt anybody.

7 Web Design Practices of Yesteryear to Avoid is a post by SEO expert Dustin Nay. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Let’s Dive In And Optimize Your WordPress Site

First, I’m making the assumption that you’re reading this article because you either have a website in WordPress, and you want to make sure people can find it from the search engines, or you are about to embark upon, or are interested in building and launching a site in WordPress, which can be easily found via the search engines. If you don’t fit either of these categories, I encourage you to read on anyway so you’ll be converted to the glorious content management system (CMS) that is WordPress.

Another assumption I make when talking about search engine optimization: that you have truly awesome content, and not just because your mother says it is. If your content is written such that your average customer would understand and find it useful and enjoyable, then you’ve got awesome content. Notice the adjective: awesome. ‘Good’ just doesn’t cut it anymore. You’ve got to ROCK the content department. In order to do that, you really ought to have an awesome content strategy.

But after you’ve considered your content strategy, there are number of additional considerations to make as you build, tweak and optimize your WordPress site. Let’s dive in.

What Does WordPress Automatically Do For You?

WordPress handles canonical URLs properly, the way Google and other search engines like it, and the way most people would like it! Rather than appending ugly file names at the end of URLs like .aspx, .html, or .php, WordPress makes these URLs ‘pretty’ and makes them very simple. This is both user and search engine-friendly.

WordPress is also structured in such a way that it encourages theme developers to use clean, organized code. When search bots can easily crawl or parse your site, it means they can process it easily, and if they can process it easily, they’ll be more likely to continue processing it as you make changes, add pages, etc. There are still some things you’ll want to alter or add to WordPress, however, so don’t sit back and relax just yet!

What Will You Need To Do Or Add To WordPress?

First, install these two plug-in:

• WordPress SEO by Yoast
• Simple 301 Redirects

If you’re unfamiliar with how to install a plug-in in WordPress, this is a great tutorial.

Permalinks

Now you’ll want to set your permalinks so they use the titles of your posts and pages. By default, WordPress will use its database query system, which populates the URLs of your pages and posts something like ?=359, for example. Each page and post has a specific number assigned. This serves the very practical purpose of quickly serving up pages and posting content from the database, but makes it more difficult for Google and your users to know what they’re looking at until the page fully loads. To make things easier on users and search bots alike, we recommend ‘pretty URLs.’

You’ll enable pretty URLs by going to ‘Settings’ then ‘Permalinks’ within the WordPress dashboard. When you arrive, you’ll see something like this:

Click on the structure you would like (the fewer directories before the title the better), and then click to save. A word of caution: if you have a ton of pages or posts (several hundred, or more), or if you intend to have a lot of pages or posts (i.e., you’ll be blogging more than once per day), then you may consider at least including the year and month in the URL as well. Otherwise, this structure will slow down your database queries, which slows your load time, which can also have a negative impact on search rankings, and it’s a big pain to go back and change this later.

Now we’re to the part where you’ll want those plug-in!

Sitemap

To make life easier for Google and friends, you should provide them with a sitemap. The best option for search engines is an XML sitemap, which is entirely unusable and invisible to your users, but makes things easier for the bots (and happy bots = more visitors!).

There is more than one way to create a sitemap, but here in WordPress Land, we enjoy plug-ins that automate things for us. Make sure you have the WordPress SEO by Yoast plug-in installed, then go to ‘SEO,’ then ‘Dashboard’ within the WordPress Admin dashboard. Here, if you haven’t done so already, you can enter the meta data to verify your Webmaster Tools accounts with the search engines. If you don’t have accounts, setup your Webmaster Tools accounts first, then verify using this tool or some other method.

By installing that plug-in, it will automatically generate an XML sitemap for you, and place it properly in the root directory of your site (http://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml). But you’ll want to have things verified with Google and Bing to make sure they have accurate information. Within the ‘XML Sitemaps’ option of the plug-in, you’ll also be able to customize things even further if you need additional options.

Redirects

If you have an existing site and need to alter your URL structure for some reason (for example, moving to WordPress from a ASP-based CMS, whose URLs generally end in .aspx), or if you are changing your domain name (rebranding, trademark dispute, etc.), you’ll want to make sure you redirect old URLs to the new location of those pages. The plug-in we are going to use only works for the domain on which it is installed, so you’ll have to either set up WordPress on the old domain for the sole purpose of redirecting, or you’ll want to get those redirects entered at the server level. This tutorial may help you if you have an understanding of PHP and system administration, but hire someone to do it right if you’re unsure on how to set up those redirects.

For example:

WordPress does not use file extensions in its URLs, so rather than http://www.mywebsite.com/about.html, that page will now be located at http://www.mywebsite.com/about/. This will cause a problem with search engines and anyone else who clicks on a link from a website somewhere else expecting to find that page. In order to make sure they arrive at the new location of that content rather than a 404 error page, you will want to set up what is called a ‘301 redirect,’ also known as a permanent redirect. There is another type of redirect called a ‘302,’ but we won’t get into that because we’re keeping things simple–302 Redirects are slightly more controversial and can cause some serious SEO problems if you don’t know why or when to use them.

301 redirects are usually performed on the server inside. This isn’t super easy though… so to make things easier for the uninitiated among us (myself included), we’ll use the Simple 301 Redirects plug-in to set things up. Just realize that if you need to redirect an old domain to a new domain, this plug-in won’t help you, and you should definitely perform those redirects on the server side to ensure permanency (in case something goes wrong on WordPress, which, though rare, happens on occasion).

Back to Simple 301 Redirects. First, go to ‘Settings’ then click ‘301 Redirects.’ Here you’ll find a place to enter the old URL as well as the new location. In the ‘old’ section, you’ll only need to enter everything following the domain name, but on the ‘new’ section, you’ll need to include everything, from http://www.mywebsite.com to everything following the domain name: /new/.

After you have them entered, click ‘Save,’ and within a few seconds your new redirect will be live and functioning!

Meta Descriptions

Another aspect of optimization is meta descriptions. These will not help your rankings, as search engines largely ignore this data anyway (and have for many years). Search engines do use meta descriptions as the site description in search engine results pages like this:

These meta descriptions should be optimized with the searcher in mind. We recommend doing the following in your meta description:

• Use target keywords within a logical phrase or sentence structure
• Make sure it makes sense!
• Keep it under 160 characters, as anything beyond this will be cut off

To update the meta description on each page and post (which you should do!), go to the page or post editor for the page or post you would like to edit, and below the content editor you’ll find the WordPress SEO editor (because you installed the plug-in, right?).

If your title is optimized the only thing you’ll need to edit is your meta description. Simply find the field marked ‘Meta Description’ and enter the text you’ve developed for that page. Click ‘Update’ on the right side of the editor (usually a blue button), and you’re all set!

A Few Things To Check On:

Check Your Header Tags

Check your theme to ensure that you’re using H1 tags at the top of each page and post. The vast majority of themes will do this by default, but just in case, you may want to spot-check a couple of pages. The title of your page or post should appear as the H1 tag for the page. You can check this in Chrome by right clicking over the title, click “Inspect Element,” and in the window that opens at the bottom of the browser, you should see highlighted HTML code starting with <h1> and ending with </h1>. If it does, you’re golden. If not, have a developer check your theme and alter the page template file if needed.

Check Your ALT Text

Also make sure all images are using ‘alt text’ in the ‘alt attributes’ part of the page. This important for three reasons:

1. Bots can’t view images, so they need alt text to tell them what an image is.
2. Blind people who are using a Braille or text-to-speech translator while browsing will need alt text to tell them what an image is.
3. If an image has problems (such as a plug-in or theme template messing up image settings, CSS or HTML not loading correctly, or images going offline due to a server error), you’ll need the alt text to tell visitors that an image should be there and what that image is.

To set the alt text, go to the Media Library, and go to the ‘Edit’ function of an image you wish to optimize. Once there, find the alt text field and enter your text. Keep it to only a few words because search bots, blind people, and disgruntled visitors won’t have the patience to listen to your thousand words describing a picture. They want a quick description so they can move on. If the image is relevant to your keyword, it doesn’t hurt to include the keyword as PART of the alt text, but do not shoot for exact matches in your alt text. Search engines want to believe you are optimizing for users, not bots, and exact-match-text is usually a red flag of over-optimization.

BONUS! A Few More Things To Consider:

Speed Up Your Site

Google also considers site load time as a small, but nonetheless important ranking factor. Joseph Scott, a friend of mine and an employee of Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has spoken long and often on this topic. Here’s a video of Joseph speaking at WordCamp Utah 2011 on the subject.

Hire a SEO firm to audit your site if needed to make sure you’ve got your ducks in a row. Even if you’ve done a lot of the work yourself, this is often a good idea to make sure you’ve got everything taken care of properly.

And last, but not least, produce AWESOME content.

Here are some additional resources:

• SEO for WordPress in the WordPress.org Codex
• WordCampSLC 2012 – I’ll probably be presenting
• If you’re in Utah, SEO.com sponsors a WordPress meet-up for users, developers, bloggers, and other interested parties. Keep up on the meet-up’s website.
• WordPress.org forums are usually a good place to find information for troubleshooting.

Dive Deeper: Tips To Optimize Your WordPress Site is a post by SEO expert Dustin Nay. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.