If there is one thing you must do to be successful online, that’s assuring good search engine rankings. It’s great to have an eye-catching website design that represents your brand in the best light. However, no matter how attractive and good-lucking your website is, no one will see it if its rankings are not good.
If your website has low rankings, it will appear on the search results on the second, third, or even fourth page. Now, be honest. When were you last checking what’s on the second or the third page?
Companies spend a lot of time and money creating a website that will be both attractive and effective. Successful companies allocate even more resources to optimize their websites and hire SEO experts to develop SEO strategies to ensure they get the best rankings on Google’s search engine.
Here are some excellent SEO tips to help you design a more search–engine-friendly site without sacrificing your style and creativity.
Improve your loading page
How long does your site need to load? An ideal website load time should be no longer than 2 seconds. 50% of all visitors say they will leave a website if the pages don’t load within 3 seconds. Improve the loading speed of your website by getting rid of all non-essential elements that slow it down.
Images are helpful if you want to convey a message visually. However, using large graphics and other elements can hurt the loading speed.
If you have large images that you want to use, you can always decrease their size before uploading them. You can use this online tool to resize images without ruining their resolution.
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Design your web navigation to be search-engine-friendly
Navigation is crucial for user experience. Your website’s map should be your number one priority if you want to implement well-organized navigation. With this high pace of living, no one has the time or the patience to get lost on your website.
Google takes into consideration that for 94% of the online users, easy navigation is the most helpful website feature and pays close attention to the website’s navigation structure.
Having user-friendly navigation with streamlined content, menu hierarchy, and responsive design will ensure your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.
When designing your navigation, don’t underestimate the importance of having an elegant page 404. When visitors type in a wrong URL or stumble upon a broken link, they will appreciate it if you don’t take them to a generic 404 page.
A well-designed 404 page should convey a brand’s personality and offer a quick path back to your home page. Adding links to other engaging content is a great way to keep your visitors on your website and don’t send them away to your competitors.
Optimize your website for all devices
Nothing ruins user experience as a website not optimized for mobile devices. In fact, unoptimized design is one of the top reasons online users leave a website.
Billions of people use smartphones as a primary device for browsing the internet. In fact, in 2021, mobile phones generate 54.25% of the traffic, while desktops – 42.9%.
Your site must be optimized and mobile responsive. A high bounce rate is a red flag for Google, and it will negatively affect your search rankings.
Design URLs search-engine-friendly
Make sure your URLs are easy to understand by people and by web crawlers. Having SEO-friendly URLs means that web bots can read them and schedule your site for indexing.
Plan your URLs effectively; the simpler, the better. It’s best to have the big picture in mind. The structure of your site folders and categories should reflect the form of your URLs. The link should start with simple categories and go deeper into your site’s pages.
Knowing how people search for your services is essential. Including keywords in your URLs will make them more SEO-friendly.
The best URLs are short and easy to read; they are descriptive and relevant, have 1 to 2 keywords, and include categories/subfolders.
Make your content is readable for search engine spiders
Written content is the bread and butter for search engine spiders because that’s how they discover and relate your website to what online users are searching on the internet. Your web design should have a good structure of the written content - headings, paragraphs, and links.
Never include important information in images, as search spiders ignore the media content and only read the HTML code and text. Web spiders are just robots and don’t acknowledge your pictures, no matter how good they look. You need to guide them towards the important content of your website.
Suppose you have to put essential information in the images, then include a clear description in the alt text. That way, search spiders can read and connect your content to relatable searches.
Write unique metadata
If your designer creates a template for your website and forgets to change the metadata for each page, it will have different pages with the same information.
The unique descriptions, titles, and keywords for every page on your website will improve your SEO rankings since the search engines will understand your website’s structure.
Block irrelevant pages
Web spiders collect all available information, even when it’s unnecessary. Indexed irrelevant pages on your website can lower your ranking because they can be duplicate content.
Block the pages you don’t want search engines to index using robots.txt file. Additionally, if some pages on your website are still in the testing phase, make sure to put a password so that crawlers don’t read them and index them for search engine utilization.
Add social signals
Your social media presence will not only increase your sales, get you positive reviews, gain long-term customers and increase brand awareness, but can also positively influence your SEO. Many studies have shown that people are more likely to visit a web page referred to them by friends and family on social media.
Find the most appropriate platform for your business and make sure you share engaging content from your website. Do it properly, and other people will start liking and sharing your content. The more likes and shares you generate, the better its effect on your SEO.
Add social media buttons in your web design and allow link sharing. If visitors like your content, they will share it on their social media and drive more traffic to your website. More clicks will increase your search engine rankings and bring your page to the top search results.
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Follow W3C standards
W3C standards are worth following because they assure your website’s technical quality. Deteriorating these standards can lead to errors, poor formatting, readability, or loading speed.
When W3C standards validate your website, it will help you get better rankings in search engines. On the other hand, if crawlers find invalid HTML or XHTML code on your web pages, you might end up penalized or removed from their indexes.
Conclusion
- Don’t use large images and other elements which slow down your loading speed.
- Design simple site navigation.
- Mobile-friendly websites will improve user experience and increase search rankings.
- Design descriptive and short URLs that both web spiders and people can understand.
- Block pages on your website that are not relevant to organic searches
- Include social share to drive more traffic.
- Follow W3C standards to ensure technical quality.
Implementing these practices in your web design can make a dramatic difference in your website’s performance, experience, and conversion rates, resulting in excellent SEO.
