SEO Website Design web design is so essential, which is why we’re going to talk about how to improve your site today. Keep search engine optimization (SEO)in mind throughout the Website Design process to make it as easy as possible to put these eight things into place.
After all, you don’t want your web development team to make the whole website, only for your SEO team to break it apart and the entire process to take even longer. Instead, having the two groups work together on each of these things during the Website Design process makes the whole project run more smoothly.
Google’s search algorithm ranks a website based on more than 200 different factors. It’s hard for one designer to think of everything. Instead, you should start by optimizing the 8 things below to get your pages to rank:
1. Mobile-friendliness
In 2022, mobile traffic will make up 55% of all traffic around the world. By 2025, it is expected that three-quarters of the world’s population will only use smartphones to connect to the internet.
Having responsive website design helps your SEO and makes sure that your target audience has a smooth experience whether they’re using a computer or a mobile device to visit your site.
Make sure you or your developer test your website to make sure it works on both desktop and mobile. This is a very crucial ranking factor because Google made a change to their algorithm in 2015 that gives responsive sites a higher ranking in search results.
2. Website speed
As of 2018, the speed of your website is another thing that Google’s algorithm takes into account. It makes sense since no one wants to deal with a website that takes forever to load. So Google won’t let them see it.
Some things that can slow down your page are:
- Hosting a website
- File sizes
- Plugins
- Coding/scripts
- Traffic volume
Google offers a free tool which is called Page Speed Insights that lets you put in the URL of your website and see where you stand.
Your website will get a different result for desktop and mobile, as well as a number of metrics that will help you figure out how to speed up your page and, in turn, how well it will rank.
3. Sitemaps
Even though Google is smart, it’s never a bad idea to help them out. And a sitemap is made for just that.
A sitemap is a file that holds all of your website’s web pages, files, videos, and other content. These are useful for websites that have a lot of different pages that don’t all link to other pages on the same website.
This makes it simpler for Google to find all of your web pages and crawl them, so they can all be ranked. In the end, if Google can’t find a web page, it won’t get any natural traffic.
4. Readability
Another important ranking factor is how easy it is to read. If people can’t read the text on your website, your business isn’t giving them anything of value.
Best practices say that your website’s headers and copy blocks should all use big, bold serif or sans serif fonts to make them easy to read.
Users can understand right away how Teachable can help them. Also, structuring your copy with heading tags helps Google find the essential parts of each page, which helps your SEO even more.
5. Names of picture files
Because the names of image files are so short, you might not even think about them, but they can be a big help to your website’s SEO. So, before you call something home-page-header-final-2.jpg, you might want to think twice.
Instead, use keywords and short descriptions that tell Google what the image is about.
In this part of Method’s website, for example, the names of the image files could be:
- aluminium-hand-wash-bottle.jpg,
- refillable-soap-pouches.jpg,
- rainbow-cleaning-products.jpg.
6. Alt tags
In the same way, your pictures also need alt tags. Several things make this important.
One, Google gives back images for almost a quarter of all search queries. Data shows that most younger people who search (62%) want visual search more than any other technology.
Google’s algorithm can figure out what’s going on in your images, thanks to alt tags. Your picture could show up in a user’s search results if it fits what they were looking for.
Your alt tag should be a full sentence that describes exactly what is in your image, with a capital alphabet at the start and a period at the end.
Second, it makes it easier to get all around. When someone with trouble seeing uses a screen reader to access your website, they can still have a great time because they can understand what your images show.
7. Web navigation
Web developers usually focus on how the site looks, how it feels, and how the user interacts with it. Designers and developers will care about the visual parts of a page and how people use those parts. Most of the time, they try to keep things as simple as possible. This is especially true now that more people use mobile devices than desktop or laptop computers.
But your website’s navigation is also very important because it links to your most important product pages or pages about features.
8. URL structure
Your SEO strategy should also be built into the way your URLs are set up. Each URL slug should only have the keyword that your page or blog post is about.
Make sure to do keyword research for every page you plan to add to or change on your website when it goes live. And do the same thing for each new page you make as you go.
This lets Google know what keyword(s) to rank your page(s) for and keeps your page(s) open to the public. Since most focus keywords are only a few words long, this makes it easy for people to remember your URL slugs and type them into a URL field if they are looking for a specific page.
Conclusion
Bridging the gap between SEO and web development is the key to making a good Website Design that is also good for SEO. Encourage your teams to work from the start so that your Website Design is both SEO- and user-friendly.
Remember that the best way to rank in search engines is to give your customers something of value. So, to improve your search results, you should optimize the above elements, write good content, and create top-notch user experiences.
