To create a professional looking and reliable website goes well beyond just aesthetics. That is due to the fact that your design choices greatly impact the SEO of your website.
SEO-driven web design along with a great digital marketing and branding agency Hampshire can go a very long way towards driving an increased amount of traffic to your business and boost your chances of achieving online success.
In this article, we have compiled some great ways to incorporate SEO effectively into your webs design.
Social media platforms integrated into your website
Like your customer-base, search engines put high value in social networking channels. When you integrate social platform accounts like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn into your design helps to improve your website’s search engine rankings. Also, it helps to enhance your online presence by expanding your fan base and increasing your followers.
Optimise images for SEO
Many people optimise the text that is on their web pages but they forget about doing that for their images. When you upload images to your website, you need to ensure they are not too large. The ideal size would be 30 to 100kb that has a resolution of 72dpi at least. Also, the images attributes should be descriptive by making sure you add a keyword to its alt text section. When ranking images search engines read and take the alt attributes into consideration. When you upload the images that comply with that criteria it will help to significantly improve your rankings.
Add new content to update all of your web pages
When you create fresh content for all of your web pages it helps to ensure your website stays relevant and also engaging for visitors. From the perspective of SEO, websites that have updated content will enjoy higher rankings compared to those that have obsolete content. When your website has new content it indicates that it is up to date which prompts higher crawling frequency from the search engine bots.
Using flash elements should be avoided
When flash elements are overused on your website it can distract your visitors as well as affect the rankings of your website. If you don’t know how to make the flash objects friendly and accessible for web-crawlers, then you should avoid using them for your navigation. They make it hard for the search engine bots to crawl them and rank your website subsequently.
Add meta descriptions, headings, and page titles
A majority of webmasters focus only on adding keywords in their blog posts and website content. There are also other key fields to put your target keys in, which include URLs, website slogans, file names, footer links, and tags.
Using targeted keywords in your header tags and titles is an excellent way to improve your on-page SEO. Also, including your main keywords into your meta-description helps with increasing your number of clicks and also your search engine rankings.
To learn about and find the most appropriate keywords for your website, you should consider using reputable SEO tools such as Similar Web, CognitiveSEO, Mox, Semrush, and Ahrefs. You can try them out on your own and take advantage of their highly subsidised or free trials.
Responsive web design
The era that we are living is characterized by mobile technologies dominating nearly every industry. That applies as well to SEO and web design. Most users use their mobile devices to surf the web like tablets and smartphones. What that means is web developers need to ensure that the default design mode is responsive design. Some SEO tools like Similar Web, Semrush, and Google Analytics can help to test the mobile-friendliness of your website.
In addition to having a mobile-friendly design, also make sure that your website is easy to navigate for both search engines and visitors. The website’s load time or speed is another design consideration which affects your SEO. Google and the other search engines will penalise websites with slow loading times.
Ensure that your URL is search-friendly
Your URLs structure can affect the website’s SEO. To make URLs that users and search engine bots will both love, use the following standard practices.
First all, keep your website’s URLs as short as you can. Also, select a URL that describes each page’s content clearly. For example, it may include keywords or have words broken up in your address in order to improve its readilbility.
