7 SEO and User Experience Nightmares

Melanie Wahl - April 5, 2012

The following are seven web design disasters that every SEO and UX person should know to avoid.   Make sure that your business’s website has not fallen victim to one of these design flaws and make sure that your visitors, whether they be human or search engine bot, understand and enjoy your website.

1. Be Cautious of iFrames

Content that is within an iFrame is not on the URL.   Each search engine views iFrames differently and may or may not spider and index a page in an iFrame.

2. Being Horribly Vague

Your navigation and anchor text should not be “page 1,” “click here,” or “more.”   Make sure that every link has keyword rich anchor text and your navigation makes logical sense.

3. Only Hyper-linking Part of A Word or Keyword Phrase

Only linking part of a keyword to an internal page on your website will not give search engines a comprehensive idea about what the page is about.   Your visitors will probably be pretty confused as well if one half of a phrase or word is hyperlinked.

4. Pop-Ups

They wreck havoc on user experience, as they are one of the most annoying features allowed in web design — which is probably why a high percentage of people now use pop-up blockers.

5. Browser Incompatibility

While we could write this as browser and bot incompatibility, you should test your website designs to make sure they can be read and understood by the largest percent of the population of people and search engines.   Testing browser compatibility will help with keeping your human visitors happy and testing whether your code is readable to most search engines can help make sure that you are indexed and new visitors can find you.

6. Too Much Of (A Possibly) Good Thing

This can be Flash animations, pages of solid images, or excessive Javascript running your website.   It may crash a browser.   It may drive your users a little crazy.   It may be read as the bots as a blank page.   See number 5 for compatibility issues again.

7.   Indecipherable URL Structure

If one of your visitors comes to your website and wants to send it to a friend via e-mail or IM or other textual medium of choice, www.yoursite.com/bunnies will probably go over better than animals.yoursite.com/US/a9/3/small/v/rabbits/bunnies since it is easily identifiable as a page about bunnies.

Avoid these seven web design no-nos and take your website toward a better SEO and UX future.   If you have a favorite SEO or UX tragedy, feel free to share it with us in the comments.