Designing websites in a way that frustrates SEO experts
Website Design and SEO
Web design and SEO refers to designing and developing websites that follow best practices for SEO. once you create a site that nails SEO and website design, you create it possible for your business to rank higher in search results, which translates to more traffic, leads, and revenue. It takes a talented team to create a successful website meaning developers and SEO pros got to work together. Here's the way to make it happen.
Why is SEO web design important?
Considering that style has got to do with visual aspects, and SEO affects how a site gets found, it's going to appear to be SEO and web design are separate sides of an equation. That's true — to some extent . Designers and SEOs perform very different tasks, and you should not expect one to try to to the other's job.
However, that does not mean SEO and web design don't work together.
Together, the 2 can have an incredible impact on your company's bottom line. That's why, if you're brooding about having a site designed or redesigned, it is vital to understand why website design and SEO are important — and what meaning for your site.
SEO web design matters because:
• Web design can erase or damage your SEO
Many companies will launch a brand-new site — or rebrand to a replacement name — and see their SEO progress disappear overnight because they forgot to line up 301 redirects. A 301 redirect tells search engines where to seek out a relocated page.
• SEO can influence your web design
once you consider SEO best practices that relate to web design, like page speed optimization and site architecture, you'll often find these factors directly influence how you design your site. Skip SEO and you will struggle to rank where you would like .
If you skip SEO website design, you'll often cost your business time, money, and rankings. It's smarter to include SEO and web design together because you'll build a foundation for your SEO strategy via your website and its design.
8 factors to optimize for web design and SEO
Now that you simply understand the link between web design and SEO, let’s take a glance at the precise aspects of your site that are suffering from both and the way you'll optimize them for SEO website design.
Design
The basic design elements of your site should, of course, be determined by your designer. However, here are a couple of things they ought to confine mind for SEO purposes:
- Code
Designers have a couple of options when it involves the code they use to render the main design elements of your site. Most stick with HTML and CSS, and permanently reason.
While Flash sites may look cool, they're extremely difficult to optimize, and as a result, they don’t have great chances of ranking well in search engines. Tell your designer to remain faraway from Flash, and your SEO will many thanks .
- Mobile-friendliness
An increasing amount of Internet users browse sites on smart phones and other mobile devices, and your site must be accessible to all or any of them. Not only will this provide a far better user experience, but it'll also help your chances of ranking well now that mobile-friendliness may be a ranking factor for Google.
The best thanks to address this is often with responsive design, which makes your site accessible on all devices and browsers. Responsive design also eliminates the potential for duplicate content, which may happen if you've got a separate mobile news site.
Readability
While designers may primarily specialise in the non-text elements of your site, it’s important that they choose fonts and sizes that are easy for your visitors to read. Also, unless the body copy is being pulled from an existing site (or has been pre-written) and is included together with your design specs, your designer should know to go away many space for copy. You’ll need many informative, optimized content so as to rank well, and a design that only looks good with a couple of sentences of text will frustrate your SEO.URL structure
Each of your pages should have a descriptive URL that describes the content on the page. Words should be divided by hyphens (NOT underscores), and you'll include a couple of relevant keywords. URLs with descriptive words (as against random numbers and letters) will help search engines understand your pages, and that they also will be easier for your site visitors to recollect .Website Speed
Do you know what’s slowing your website down? Chances are, it could have something to try to to together with your web design. Website speed is one among the foremost important aspects of technical SEO, and it’s a primary deficiency for several websites.
If you haven’t been ranking well, it might be that your news website is simply too slow and other people are bouncing quickly. Never forget that page speed may be a known ranking signal, so you would like to devote some time to speeding up your site by optimizing your images, eliminating unnecessary plugins, allowing browser caching, and so on.
Now, you would possibly actually think your website loads quickly enough, not knowing how long people are literally willing to attend . Ideally, your website should load in two seconds. When it takes longer than three seconds, as many as half the users visiting your site are likely to abandon it. Page speed is more important on mobile devices, where people are even less likely to spend time waiting.
Page speed isn't only important to users, but it’s also important to Google. The speed of your website affects Google’s ability to crawl it. If your page speed causes Google to crawl fewer pages, you won’t have as many pages getting indexed. When this happens, it'll be impossible for these pages to rank in the least . Ensuring website security through “https” encryption is important .
- Gaining Users’ Trust
Unlike another SEO factors, you actually cannot measure what proportion people trust you or your website. However, gaining trust remains an enormous a part of getting your website to rank higher.
There’s little question that the majority people are quick to make opinions, and once they need them, it are often difficult to vary their minds. Over the years, we've gotten wont to seeing perfected news websites that provide phenomenal user experiences. this is often what we naturally expect to ascertain once we open an internet site .
We want something that’s clean, easy to navigate, which can quickly give us the knowledge we would like . We tend to think these sorts of websites just seem more trustworthy. If an internet site looks old and outdated or is just too difficult to use, most of the people are going to be left with a nasty impression and that they could leave and not come .
You could have a product or service which may be exactly what they're trying to find , but your website doesn’t convey this. A bad website will make it appear as if your business or organization simply doesn’t put in much effort.
Conclusion
SEO is best wiped out partnership with web design, and improving your web design doesn’t need to be difficult. Keep these pointers in mind when designing your website and you'll soon start seeing the upper rankings that are eluding you.