I cannot agree more that, “…one of the most critical aspects is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). If you overlook this while you focus on creating a flashy website, you may find it incredibly difficult to get your website off the ground and attract a reasonable amount of web traffic.”
SEO is continuous, from conception to go live to ongoing changes; it is not “set and done”.
This article lays out the many aspects of SEO that you need to consider including technical aspects and modifying the copy.
How Combining SEO and Web Design Can Boost Your Marketing Efforts
Page rank is everything when it comes to marketing your business online. Sure, it’s important to have a website that looks great and serves as a hub for your customers, but one of the most critical aspects is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). If you overlook this while you focus on creating a flashy website, you may find it incredibly difficult to get your website off the ground and attract a reasonable amount of web traffic.
While SEO may not be everything when it comes to online marketing, it is an integral component that cannot be overlooked if you want your site to succeed. By planning your site according the the ever-changing algorithms of search engines, you can achieve a higher ranking for your page, which will lead to more traffic coming to your website. This can help to grow your business and edge out your competitors. All D5 Creation Themes are properly optimized for SEO. So, you can use them for your websites easily.
SEO is a key component of web design that needs to be considered from the earliest stages of website building. From planning, to launch, to any updates and changes, SEO always needs to be on your mind. There are many aspects of SEO that you need to consider in your web design, but the following are some of the most critical.
Make Sure Your URLs Are Optimised
One of the key intersections of web design and SEO involves optimising your URLs. A well thought out page name can serve as a significant boost to your SEO. Let’s say you have a page that is dedicated to party planning. A URL such as https://d5creation.com/psh is unlikely to line up with common keywords that searchers would be using. It is much more likely that they would be searching for Responsive WordPress Website, so a URL such as https://d5creation.com/responsive-wordpress-website would likely be much more effective from an SEO perspective.
Depending on your business, it may also be advantageous to include your location in the URL. If you operate a restaurant, a plumbing business or any other company that serves the local market, local searches may be very important to your business model. Incorporating URLs such as https://d5creation.com/business-website can help to increase your page rank in your local area. This is because URLs have significant weight when it comes to SEO.
Pick Up the Pace
When designing a website, it is easy to focus on the visual appeal and the content itself, rather than the mechanics behind how the website functions. This can lead to a bloated and slow website that is time consuming for users to visit. Not only will a slow and poorly performing site cause issues for your potential customers, but search engines will pick up on it too.
Search engines incorporate a range of different metrics into their algorithms for determining which sites are best and should be ranked highest. These include the use of keywords, links and page load times. If your site loads too slowly, search engines will penalise it and favour other sites ahead of it.
There are several different issues that can lead to a slow site. These include elements such as sharing buttons, plugins and JavaScript that haven’t been optimised. Low quality hosting can also be a big problem. If your site is slow because of any of these issues, you should rectify them immediately to improve your rankings. You may be amazed at how much your rankings can change just by switching over to better hosting. A neat trick is to use a VPN service to simulate accessing your site from other locations. This can help with identifying speed issues outside of your own location.
Don’t Forget SEO on Your Images
It’s easy to get caught up in the written content of your website and forget that images need to be optimised for SEO too. There are several different things that you can do to optimise your images. As we discussed before, site load times are very important for SEO. Because of this, it is important to avoid having pictures that are too big and that slow down your site. If necessary, scale back the size of your pictures until the site is more responsive.
Another key step in image SEO is to alt-tag all of your pictures. This gives search engines more information when they crawl your site. Alt-tags provide a description of the image, but they are for more than just SEO purposes. They are also used by screen-readers to describe images to bind and visually-impaired people.
Title tags are another important aspect that can be helpful for your SEO. If you use appropriate keywords, it can help to boost your SEO ranking. You will need to do your keyword research beforehand, but you can use these terms and apply them to your images for even further optimisation of your page. Make sure that the keywords are relevant to the image, otherwise you may end up doing more harm than good.
Stay Up to Date
Part of a search engine’s business strategy is to serve the best and most accurate information to their customers. If Google fails to give its searchers what they are looking for, then we might see the triumphant return of AskJeeves on the horizon. Because of this, search engine algorithms tend to favour current information over pages that haven’t been updated or changed for a significant period of time.
If you want to retain a high page rank, you should be making sure that your pages are regularly updated with the latest information and pictures. This is important for your site’s most visited pages, but it is also good to maintain a blog where you regularly post new and interesting content. Having the latest content that is rich in relevant keyword will give your site a large boost from an SEO perspective.
Content Blocks Can Hurt
Monetising websites is definitely a challenging process. Some do it solely through advertising, but the business models of other sites may necessitate different means. Blocking off content can be an important part of these strategies, but it can also have ramifications for your SEO.
Having blocked sections of your site can affect your page ranking negatively, even if only some content is behind a paywall, or other parts are for members only. If you decide that you do need block off sections of your website, you need to consider how it will affect your SEO beforehand. To compensate for any blocked content, you should make sure that your landing page is optimised to a high degree. It is also best to have other sections freely available and optimised, otherwise you may find that your low page rank means that very few people ever even get to your paywall.
Bring Up Your Mobile Game
In 2016, mobile internet-use surpassed desktop usage, a trend that is only set to become more and more pronounced. Every year, the number of mobile searches grows astronomically. With more and more people visiting sites from their phones, you need to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly in order to tap into a huge percentage of the market.
It goes even further than just trying to reach your market, because search engines also know the value of a mobile-friendly websites and they give them significant weight in their algorithms for mobile-based searches. Google also has a mobile-first index on the horizon, although the exact date of delivery has yet to be announced. When it does come, Google will use the mobile version of content in its primary index. This means that even for desktop searches, the page rank will be based on mobile content. They are also coming up with a new process for measuring page speed for mobile sites. This is because the desktop speed is irrelevant for the mobile site.
In preparing for Google’s mobile-first index, there are several things that businesses need to do. The first is to incorporate a responsive design, which gives users the same site that they would see on a desktop, but with the content displayed in a slightly different manner. Often, the content is incorporated into the narrow screens of smartphones by displaying in a more compact form that you can scroll through. This is the preferred method from Google’s perspective, because it makes it easier for them to index.
There are also advantages for your site visitors, because it means that everyone can access the same site design, no matter which device they are using. It makes things simpler from a navigation perspective as well, because content is in the same place, whether they view it with their mobile or desktop. It is easier for customers to use, reducing confusion for your users, as well as your potential bounce rate. This is yet another advantage from an SEO perspective.
For a site to be mobile-friendly, you also need to make sure that the text is large enough to read. Having links that are too close together may also hinder your SEO performance, because it can be difficult to tap them precisely with fingers. If there are any blocks on the files, you may need to get your developer to update your robot.text file to optimise your site.
If you take all of these aspects into account, you can design your site in a way that is mobile-friendly and convenient for your users. This will give you a significant boost in your page rankings, which is critically important when you consider the rapid growth of mobile use.
SEO Needs to Be a Part of Your Web Design from the Start
SEO is a critical part of any digital marketing strategy, but it can’t just be thought about in isolation. The reality is that SEO overlaps with many other disciplines, especially web design. Because of this, you need to be considering SEO from the beginning of your site development so that you can maximise its benefits. If you haven’t done this, you may find that overhauling your website to incorporate more SEO practices can be well worth the investment.
In the modern era, SEO and web design are essential parts of most businesses. Online competition is especially fierce, so site owners need to put in a continuous effort to make sure that their web design and SEO are up to date. By thinking about them together, you can boost your marketing efforts and help to ensure that your pages rank highly in search engines. This can give you an edge over your competition and help to drive your business to greater success.
https://d5creation.com/seo-and-web-design/
On – 07 Jun, 2017 By Aimee Dillard