Whether you have a high-tech good looking website, or an older website that “gets the job done”, you may be losing potential clients due to overlooked effective design principles. A website may look great, but have poor Search Engine Optimization making it hard to find your well designed website. On the other end of the spectrum the website may look outdated, with old technology that hasn’t been updated in a while loses search engine ranking due to Search Engines thinking that your website is dormant or dead. Either way your losing potential customers, which means your losing potential revenue.

Both websites will struggle to get the volume of traffic that they could receive. The new well-designed site may get traffic for those looking specifically for that site, but anyone using a keyword search for your product or services won’t find you.

The older site with out of date content loses out because the Search Engines think (due to the lack of fresh content) that the site is dormant or dead. Both of these websites could receive great traffic and a potentially lucrative increase in business, but without consideration of SEO, they won’t get any share of that possible income.

So what are some problem areas that should be considered red flags for a redesign?

All Flash & Splash Pages

Although there have been significant advances in Search Engine technology and they are beginning to read some flash, a site that’s all flash is likely to be dreadful for Search Engines. They will be pretty, but the Search Engines won’t rank them highly because the content is essentially unreadable. But what about major corporations that rank highly but have flash-only sites? These sites have such a high rate of linkage that their flash content probably doesn’t matter, unless you can compete with a major corporation, an all flash sites is a no go.

Web designers using splash pages really make a visual impact on the visitor. Imagine the entire webpage as an animated page, straight out of a cartoon. Very impressive. Unfortunately, from an SEO point of view, they’re horrible. Splash pages generally contain little or no text content; have no links and full of flash and other software which the Search Engines still find difficult to assess for a ranking. You may impress with your Splash Pages, but kiss goodbye to many potential customers.

Frames

Frames in your website make it difficult for search engines to index its pages. What’s more, human visitors really struggle with frames, they’re difficult to read and it’s hard to get an impression of the site. Some browsers don’t even support frames, meaning your site is entirely unreadable for those potential customers.

Slow Loading

Very simply, a slow loading page puts off both human visitors and search engine crawlers. Human visitors may not have the patience to wait for the pages to load and search engines almost always rank the faster loading pages above the slower ones. If your site has slow loading pages, they need replacing.

Out of Date Content

First, the Search Engines will simply ignore this site as if it no longer exists. It may have been ok in the past to leave your content for months without updating it, but these days, it will soon slip off the radar without regularly updated content. What’s more, nothing puts off a human visitor more than out of date content.

If your site contains any of the above SEO problems, you need to implement a redesign; it’s costing you potential income.