Planning to spread the word about your business? It’s a must these days to create an online presence. And what can be a better way to do that than building a website? But that’s not enough. When you are looking to let people know about your website, it is essential for the site to rank high on search engine results.
If you are looking to make the most of your online presence, it is essential to build a website that’s SEO friendly. And when you are planning to do it, a lot of components come into play. One of the most important among them is, surely, web design.
So, what steps do you need to undertake if you are planning to create an SEO-friendly web design?
Here’s a quick look.
Integrate Social Media
These days, one of the major website components that get valued by the search engines is social media. So, when you are designing your business website, do not forget to integrate social media with the design. You should include social media icons of sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and so on. When a visitor clicks on the icons, he should be redirected to your account or page on these social media platforms. In addition to helping your website rank high on search engines, this will also help to drive conversations with the customers, which can come in handy for your business.
Don’t Replace Important Texts with Images
If you want your site to be found through organic search, it is important to make it rank high on SERPs. And for that, it is essential to ensure that your site is found easily by the search engines.
But how can you do that?
One of the best ways to make the website easy-to-index for the search engines is to use HTML text formats. They are better crawled by search engines than even the images, videos, and such other components. So, never even consider to replace major text of the website with images. It might help to make the site look attractive, but the result will be devastating in terms of SEO.
Create a Proper Navigation
Scenario 1: A user lands on your website and spends a lot of time there, moving from one page to another.
Scenario 2: A user lands on your website, speeds through the page and leaves. Because he didn’t find any proper way to easily navigate to other pages of the website.
Which scenario would you like to see happening for your website?
Of course, the second one. Google does that too. It offers more value to websites that have less bounce rate.
But what’s the way to achieve that?
When you are designing the website, you need to include an effective navigation too. And the most useful one for this purpose will be breadcrumb navigation. It can come in handy to retain the customer for some more time and reduce the bounce rate. Besides, do not commit the mistake of placing the menu at a place where most visitors miss it. In fact, the menu should be properly visible as soon as a visitor lands on the website. This plays a major role in enhancing a website’s SEO prospects.
Use the Images Prudently
Images play an extremely important role in website designing. And they occupy a place of equal importance in SEO as well. You need to manage the images in a proper way while designing a website to ensure that the site ranks high in terms of SEO.
So, how can you do that?
Here are a few tips.
- Keep the image sizes small to drive fast page loading.
- Alt tag is a must. And don’t forget to include the image size while creating the alt tag.
- Use the image in perfect context for better results.
Proper use of the images while designing the site is sure to help it perform well in terms of SEO.
Being Responsive is a Must
Responsive web design is surely the call of the day. So, there’s no way you can avoid it any more, especially after Google’s Mobilegeddon update. It clearly states that Google is going to rank those sites higher, which can be viewed properly on both mobile as well as desktop devices. And there’s reason for that too. Mobile data traffic has been increasing significantly over the last few years, and it is likely to continue over the next few as well.
It is always important to ensure that your website appears great. And that’s why you need an amazing web design. But you will also have to keep in mind the SEO aspect. Only by blending both of these together, you are likely to get a website that is nice to look at and is effective in terms of SEO as well.
Image Courtesy: poweredwebsite.com
