As you choose to design or redesign your website, SEO factors should never be ignored. A strong SEO campaign on your site is essential to ensure the success of your business. Still, there are hundreds of businesses which are still struggling to have SEO friendly websites due to lack of knowledge or initiative.
In order to make this possible, you need to design your website after much planning.
So, how can you use SEO to ensure the effectiveness of your web design? Here are some tips which are helpful and worth considering when designing your website.
CMS: The CMS or the content management system you choose in your site plays a role in determining how successful your website will be, when considering SEO. Though WordPress has a smart CMS, this is not the single option available – start looking beyond WordPress. Any CMS you choose should be able to help you in optimising your CMS. Thus, as you start your campaign, do a bit of research to know which part of your CMS can be altered later on.
Site Structure: The structure of the website actually helps in determining how your target audience gets around. It is known that there is a certain way by which information flows on any website. This is a path which is usually taken by any visitor. Thus, every web designer needs to have this fact in mind, that if site visitors are having a tough time navigating in the website or in reaching their destination, the traffic of the website shall be affected.
Mobile Friendly Web Design: Web designers need to keep in mind that any mobile-friendly website helps in getting better traffic. Any responsive website is favoured by the search engines. A responsive web design helps the website in adjusting the screen according to how it is viewed. A mobile friendly website means happy customers who are certainly going to recommend your website.
Use of Relevant Keywords: We all know the significance of keywords in SEO. Your website should be using the relevant keywords but should never use it in excess. If it is used excessively, the site might appear spammy to the search engines and it is not going to help SEO.
Image Optimisation: Web designers have a major role in giving an aesthetic appeal to any website. The typography, patterns, choice of colours, symmetry, geometric shapes and everything else have a significance. Thus, optimisation of selected images is necessary since large images tend to block optimal user experience as it slows down the pages. Designers need to optimise images which can be done by reducing the file size with the help of a script or a plugin.
Fast Navigation: When designing a website, it is vital to ensure that navigating the website is never tough. Complex navigations or too many options is often confusing for the visitors. The menu bars should be placed strategically and never cluttered which can be complex. Users should have a smooth navigation as they land on a specific website. They should be able to find the specific section quickly. The navigation bar can be placed right at the top or by the left margin of page. It is easy to notice which makes the website user-friendly and customers will have a smooth time.
JavaScripts: As you choose to design your website you need to ensure that you are not using JavaScript for the whole site design. There might be crawling issues, if too much JavaScript is used and search engines will find it difficult to index it.
Page Load Time: How quickly your website loads is quite important from the perspective of a website. Consumers are impatient and busy – they do not prefer to wait till a page loads. Mobile users tend to wait for 5-6 seconds while desktop users tend to click away to another site, in just 3 seconds if the page doesn’t load within that time. In order to reduce such a page load time, designers should use small image, need to enable compression and also minimise JavaScript amongst other things which can be done. Google's PageSpeed Insights is an excellent tool to check your website speed and fix some issues as recommended by Google.
Creation of Sitemaps: Creating sitemaps have been one of the best web design practices. Since the first time, search engines used sitemaps, these have become a critical component of the website structure. A sitemap helps in easy navigation and increases the search engine visibility. It also informs the crawlers about any kind of change on the website. This helps in quicker indexing of the page. Depending on your choice of CMS, there is several modules and plugins available for you to automatically create such sitemaps. Creating an XML sitemap is recommended by experts.
It require some technical know-how and experience to develop a website good for SEO. Talk to our web designers to understand how we can help you build your website with SEO in mind.
