Eight Recommendations to Create a Web Design That is SEO Friendly
For an online business, a website is essential. Most companies get trapped in the fancy design cycle and develop shiny websites that aren’t ranked by Google and other search engines. The website will be of no good if it isn’t visible to the people.
That is where search engine optimization comes into play. By implementing SEO, you can increase your website’s organic traffic and have your website on top of its game.
SEO-friendly websites mean that Google and all other search engines can efficiently. It can crawl through all the pages on your website, understand the website’s content effectively, and index the website in their database. Once your website is indexed, the search engines will serve the most valuable and relevant web pages of your website to the users.
Among the billions of people who use search engines, less than 5% of them visit the Google search engine’s second page. So your website must be SEO-friendly to be on the first page of search engines. Here is an outline to help you build an SEO-friendly website.
User-friendly website:
You will find several websites that are extremely difficult to navigate. Many are frustrating to navigate, especially with broken links leading to “404 pages not found” error. While you design your website, your focus should be on getting visitors and enticing them to stay on the website and see your products and services. That is the point where you can turn visitors into customers.
You can get a high ranking for your website by getting multiple clicks on your website. It is attainable by internal linking. You can increase traffic to your website’s other pages by strategically placing the links in your website.
Optimize your website for mobile phones:
Mobile internet usage has increased significantly across the world. More and more people now browse either on their tablets or mobile phones. The use of desktop for searching has decreased.
Your website design must be compatible with desktop computers and accessible on tablets and mobiles. The responsive design of your website makes it easily accessible on all devices. Another advantage is that Google ranks mobile-friendly websites higher. You don’t have to launch separate websites for these devices. Choose one responsive template for your website. It will automatically resize and reshape for all the screen sizes.
Keep it visually pleasing:
Who doesn’t like a visually pleasing website? But visuals don’t necessarily mean that the website has to be over the top in its design. Your users are interested in websites that are easy to navigate and offer more information. So having music on autoplay, several pop-ups, and ads on your website will turn off the users. The users will exit quickly if your website is too flashy and lacks substance.
Update website content regularly:
You will be surprised to know that most websites fail at updating their content. Your website will lose its search engine ranking if you don’t update its content from time to time.
Since the internet is continually evolving, your website should stay current as well. Keep the content on your website relevant. If your website is about beauty trends, look for beauty related information and popular stories in the industry. Staying current doesn’t mean that you have to update website content every day. Doing it once a week is enough.
Accurate keywords and their placement:
You cannot deny the importance of relevant keywords and their placement throughout your website. Look for keywords that are relevant to your product or service.
Then, incorporate the chosen keywords in the content throughout your website. Keyword generator is a useful tool for this purpose as it generates top rated keywords. Using these keywords will improve the ranking of your website on the search engines. If the service or product you offer is across the world, you must look for more specific keywords. For instance, if you have a tennis equipment business, your keywords should be tennis outfits, tennis rackets, or tennis lessons.
Website speed:
Do you check the transition time of your website while doing the SEO audit? You must see if you can move from one page of your website to another quickly. With a minimal attention span of internet users, don’t expect them to wait for your website to load.
A slow site is a red flag when it comes to ranking on search engines. If your website isn’t loading quickly, there can be several things going wrong. Your website might have several graphics, plugins, low server, or outdated CMS (content management system). Too much traffic on your website is only useful if you can handle your website’s traffic flow. So if you plan to put your products or services on sale, you must be well prepared to take the visitor influx.
Blog:
Introduce a blog on your website. It is essential if your product or service rarely changes. You will still need content, and through a blog, you can produce content around your product by using relevant keywords. Develop internal linking to your product pages through the keywords used on the blog. Search engines will rank your website blog as an expert in the industry based on the content. Having a blog will also give a personal touch as people will be able to leave comments and communicate.
Social media as a booster:
If you want a massive boost to your SEO friendly website, social media is the way to go. You can bring your social media audience to your website with an SEO friendly website.
You can direct your website’s traffic to social media platforms by using plugins on your site’s homepage. These plugins create social media profile graphics on your website. They show the number of page likes and followers your social media platforms have. The plugins also offer the latest posts of social media platforms on your website. You can optimize your website through social media platforms by sharing the website and blog links.
Conclusion:
Having an attractive and user-friendly website is very important but making it SEO friendly is even more crucial. The designers and developers should be well acquainted with essential SEO-friendly techniques. They should be aware of how the search engine crawlers work. If SEO is done right and made part of the web design process, it will add value to the overall website experience. User experience will get better hence helping you achieve your marketing goals.