Web Development “Fails” That Affect SEO Performance

Our Head of SEO, Tom Williams, highlights some common Web Development Fails that affect SEO Performance.

The technical SEO team here at ClickThrough Marketing spend their time site scanning, auditing websites and planning for website migrations.

This ensures our clients’ websites are technically sound, and have great foundations to build on with our organic SEO strategies.

Here’s a quick checklist of web development fails that can have a negative impact on SEO performance:

• Heading Tags for formatting in the banner and footer

These dilute the keyword strength and cause duplicate h tags across the website. This is not considered best practice.

• Infinite websites

Hrefs don’t have a leading slash, which results in an infinite loop. This causes difficulty with crawling and affects page load time, and can produce duplicate pages.

• txt Blocking Whole Sites

Unable to crawl > decrease in rankings > no traffic.

Putting a new website live with the staging site robots file still live is not considered best practice, according to the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

• Implementing Lazy Load Without Pagination

If lazy load is driven by JavaScript, it’s important that users can still access the paginated pages even when JavaScript is disabled. If this functionality is not enabled, crawlers are not able to access the paginated pages, which may result in these pages not getting indexed.

If you’re coming up against web development issues that are affecting the performance of your SEO strategies, don’t worry. Our team of dedicated technical SEO experts can help you to improve performance and avoid these mistakes in the future.

If you’re looking to run a scan or technical audit on your site, or you want to improve your website’s existing foundations for building on with organic strategies, get in touch with us today.

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