SEO Design Mistake: Splash Pages!
Web Design can play a crucial role in the SEO process. There are some things to avoid when designing a web page. Today, I'd like to mention the first tip, in a series of tips about Web Design and SEO.
Splash pages are usually beautiful, graphically rich pages designed to impress visitors when they first arrive to a website. The problem with splash pages—whether they include “Skip Intro”links or not—is that they are a wasted opportunity. If visitors must click and if search engines must crawl farther to reach the real home page you’ve put up a barrier to success.
Other factors that must be taken into consideration when implementing a splash page are:
- Splash pages lack keyword-rich text: Search Engines cannot read flash animations or fancy images. So every time a search engine visits your splash page, it will find practically no visible body text, except possibly, "skip intro."
- Splash pages have only one link and are rarely cross-linked. Most splash pages link to a single page within a site (usually, the real home page). This format tells search engines only one page on your site is important.
- Splash Pages are redundant: Specially those that show a text with a "Click here to enter" button once an animation has finished.
When possible, from an SEO perspective, a web designer should avoid the usage of splash pages for the reasons exposed above. One tip is to analyze the user behavior of the visitors of your site, check the bounce rate of that splash page, and if the percentage is too high you can try to remove the page and check if that percentage goes down.
