Note: This post was republished from 2015 since the topic is still relevant.
Pretty Websites Have Problems Too!
Your drop dead gorgeous WordPress site may be killing your website SEO (and ruining the mobile experience for your readers). Here’s a quick video showing you what to check on your site. Make sure it doesn’t just look pretty, but performs well, too.
My client came to me with a very pretty website she paid another designer (a LOT of money) to create for her. She came to me for help because some of the text on her pages was too small to read on mobile. After digging around on her site for a few minutes I uncovered the problem.
There were three things happening that were killing her website SEO & mobile for her visitors:
Text that is actually a jpg or png image file: This is actually one of the most common problems I see on websites I review. When you have text on a page, the search engines can crawl that content and identify what is in the image. They cannot use the information to rank your pages.
Text in images is very small: Visitors cannot read the text when a mobile device reduces the size of the image.
Images do not contain keyword rich titles or alt tags: Even though my client paid for an SEO optimized site, none of her images were tagged properly. Her designer should have saved the image file as the keyword with a descriptive alt tag that included the keyword phrase.
Website SEO Tips
Better mobile & SEO optimization of images:
Stay away from using images with lots of text in them on your site.
If you do have an image with text, keep the text large so when the image size is reduced on a mobile device the text can still be read by your visitors.
Remember that search engines cannot tell what is in the image, so be sure to save your image file name as your keyword phrase and use an alt tag to tell the search engines what the picture is about. (See the image to the right for how to tag your images in the WordPress media uploader.)
Heather Stephens is a marketing strategist, website designer, and the founder of Wise Owl Marketing and the Peaceful Marketing Lab, a membership community for coaches and service providers who want marketing that feels like an extension of the work they love and creates predictable growth without the burnout.
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