For your construction website to achieve its intended purpose, it must first be indexed by search engines and be found by the target audience. This is achieved by a combination of both excellent website design practices and search engine optimization. The web is constantly evolving and search optimization techniques that are relevant today might be considered obsolete a few months from now. It means that you must continuously improve website SEO if your website is to remain search engine friendly and user-accessible.

SEO can be divided into two main categories: on-page and technical SEO, and off-page SEO.

1. Off-page SEO focuses more on external factors such as link building.
2. On-page and technical SEO, on the other hand, focus more on the website design and its content.

Both are important. But if you want to get almost instant SEO results, starting with your on-page and technical optimization is recommended. While you’re at it, here are some of the things to avoid.

Using images to display important information

Images are an important web design element. They add visual appeal to the web page and help break down large blocks of content. However, images should never be used as a replacement for text. To date, search engines cannot read images. Adding the alt and or figcaption tag may help but they might not quite describe what the entire image is about.

Another disadvantage is that images don’t resize the same way as text on a web page. Web browsers will try to resize an image depending on the device size. The text displayed on images might be easy to read on desktop browsers but might be too small to read on mobile devices. Therefore, never use an image to display important information such as telephone numbers, website urls and addresses.

Any important information should be in the form of text or HTML markup. Luckily, HTML5 provides a host of tags which can be used to markup web pages with important information. For example, using the tel attribute in a link tag can be used to link telephone numbers for click to call on mobile devices.

Having a non-mobile friendly website

Google periodically rolls out new algorithm updates. In April 2015, the search engine rolled out the mobile-friendly algorithm. This required websites to be mobile friendly in order to rank high in search results. The update was meant to enhance positive user experience especially for the growing number of users accessing the web using mobile devices. Once the update was rolled out, non-mobile friendly websites were less likely to feature among the first search engine results pages on mobile searches.

It’s expected that by 2020, the number of smart phone users globally will reach 6.1 billion. As a website owner, improving website SEO with regard to making it mobile friendly shouldn’t just be in order to avoid being penalized by Google. It should be a marketing strategy to gain a piece of this growing market.

Flash

In the early years of the web, flash technology trounced basic HTML simply because it brought websites to life. Today, any construction website using flash technology misses out on a host of advantages that make it search engine friendly and easily accessible via mobile devices.

You don’t want your website to show up like this for your potential clients.

With regard to search engine indexing, the majority of search engine bots cannot read flash. This means that there’s zero chance of being indexed and ranking in a major search engine such as Google. The search engine actually blocks Adobe Flash Player content on its Chrome browser. To further illustrate the point that Flash is dying, Facebook made a similar move opting for all its videos to play via HTML over flash.

With regard to accessibility, many of the popular smartphones do not support flash. With the increasing number of browsers and search engines adopting HTML and other technologies over flash, it’s unlikely that future smartphones will support flash content either.

Search engine optimization is changing at a rapid pace. This change is largely driven the search engine’s need to enhance user experience and deliver content that’s relevant to specific searches. The shift towards smartphones and the rise of new technologies such as HTML5 has placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of on-page and technical SEO. Although it’s important to know what search optimization techniques to use, it also helps to know which ones to avoid if your construction website is to be search engine friendly and easily accessible.

Wrapping Up

If your website is violating any of these issues, we’d love to help you fix them to improve your search rankings and make it easier for clients to find you and do business with you.

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