You have just launched a new design of your website, it looks amazing, with lots of new features and comfortable navigation. Let’s say last month you had an average 10,000 visitors per week and expected more with new design because it is much better. But as a result you have only 500 visitors. So what has happened? It must not perform well in search engines, there are many cases where animated design can have a bad influence on SEO. Here arises the dilemma between User Experience and Search Engine Optimization. Of course you need to care about good user experience and always find new ways to improve it, but also do not forget about SEO.

Here are 3 main mistakes which do not let search engines find you.  

1.  Images and videos instead of important elements.

Flash is very beautiful to look at, but search engines do not understand beauty and it’s more difficult for them to crawl your site. If you put important information in a video or picture, search engine can’t notice it. Of course you don’t have to reduce all the flash, but not for important content or navigation. Therefore, it’s always you to decide the prior ities.

2. Your site isn’t mobile friendly at all or you have a mobile version.

With mobile usage continuing to grow, the search engines can see that mobile optimized sites are preferred amongst their users and will rank sites accordingly to deliver the best results. There are two ways to make a website mobile friendly. Create a mobile version or a responsive web design. However, Google itself states that site with responsive design are in priority. Having a mobile version, you get two separated pages and each of them get rated by Google separately, consequently their PageRank is much lower.

3.  Lack of Breadcrumbs.

While hiking in the woods, you forgot to leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Now you are hopelessly lost and can’t find your way back home. Does this sound like your website?  Breadcrumbs not only help make the website more user-friendly, but they also helps search engines figure out the hierarchal navigation structure.  Text links are easily read by search engines and provide a transparent hierarchical navigation structure. Unfortunately, designers often forget about breadcrumbs, despite the fact that they would noticeably increase the user friendliness of the site.