Effective SEO for a website requires the smooth interaction of lots of little parts. Quality on-site content, regular content updates, and links from other reputable websites all have an impact on your website's search engine rankings. However, the structure of your B2B website design can contain lots of less obvious errors that work against your SEO efforts.

Review your website for these hidden errors that can accidentally unravel all your hard-earned SEO progress.

Haphazard keyword use

Keywords play a significant role in your SEO. Create a list of relevant and important keywords for your business before launching your business's content marketing plan or undertaking any significant web redesign. Overuse of keywords can also cause search engines to get suspicious of your content so be sure not to over-saturate. Read all of your website's pages to determine if the content contained on the page is relevant and useful for human readers looking for helpful information. If the page is full of syntax problems due to keyword stuffing, you're probably not utilizing keywords efficiently. It's better to strategically use less keywords than to drown your pages in keywords that don't make sense.

Not using pretty permalinks

Look at the URLs of all of your website's pages. Do they read like plain English (ex. "Http://www.yourwebsite.com/contact-us") or do they read like a string of characters and page ID numbers? Permalinks that contain keywords are more favored by search engines so speak with your webmaster about updating your links to contain information, not just characters and numbers. When your small business web design is being updated, ask your new web designer to make sure that pretty permalinks are a part of your website.

Not linking to other content on your site

Your website looks more legitimate to search engines if you link to other pages within the site. Review all the content on your website and see where you can cross-link to blog posts, product or services pages, contact information or special offers. These are also great ways to keep users clicking within your site and thus deepen their relationship to your business.

Using too much flash animation

Flash animation might be pretty to the eye, but it's difficult for search engines to crawl. When important information is contained in animated videos or images, search engines can't see it. When planning your B2B firm's website design, speak with your web designer about how to minimize the negative SEO affects of flash. Or, consider not using flash animation at all.

Using images instead of important information

Search engines crawl your entire website looking for important information that makes your site seem trusted. While it's tempting to upload just an image for your business logo, location, or page titles, be aware that this robs you of an opportunity to supply important information to the search engines. If you must use images, be sure to update your meta-tags with the correct information or find other places to insert the information in text form, like header bars or footers.

Page errors, dead pages and obsolete links

Search engines shy away from websites that look abandoned. Go through your website's back end and identify outdated links and dead pages. Remove dead links and update page redirects to make sure that your website's pages are leading to fresh and current site content.

Your B2B firm's web design and on-screen content can have a huge impact on your site's SEO rankings. If you're not sure how to make the updates above to your website, work with your site administrator to develop a plan to amend your site's content.