A website is an identity that defines your digital marketing efforts. It is viewed by many online visitors who are looking for offered products or services. A Well-designed website is not merely focused on its aesthetics, but also on its functionality. It should be well optimized so that it shows up to the public on search engines results to lead generation and yield benefits. And for this, web designs should be compatible with SEO because it has a significant role to play in making it profitable.
Table of Contents
So Why Does a Website Need SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a method to improve a site with ranking on search engines and enhancing its usability. A business website having impressive designs but a poor chance at search rankings will fail to make its presence online. In order for the website to be successful, it is important to be a search engine friendly one so that it has quality search rankings. It makes a site more visible on the search engine results, thus driving more traffic to it.
Many times developers and businesses think too little about SEO and web design connection. They are too focused on its aesthetics, ignoring the fact that the site should have enough quality content for search engines to rank effectively. Websites appearing on the top positions of search engines help in business branding and win user’s trust. In the absence of SEO, it would be a challenge to find valuable websites and businesses on search engines. For this reason, a web designer should focus on making SEO an integral part of the web design. This will draw potential customers to a business offering and build its reputation.
How SEO helps with the ranking?
SEO consists of three primary functions:
- Crawl – scan and understand the webpage’s contents and links for each URL.
- Index – store and organize all the crawled contents of websites for retrieval purposes.
- Rank – determine the contents of webpages and position them for relevant search queries.
Let’s take a closer look at the elements that can contribute to the optimized web design process.
Navigation
Website navigation is a menu that helps in leading the user to what they are looking for. Quality website navigation enhances SEO performance. They are a list of links that connect website pages and tell SEO crawlers and visitors which pages are important. It is important to write descriptive anchor text in the navigation bar. This means they are more focused on keywords that have pages dedicated to these keywords links. They help with better search results as it makes easier for the right content to be found. Make use of content hierarchies as categories and sub-categories organize content on website pages aids in better rankings on Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Also, design it by using simple languages like CSS and JavaScript instead of using Flash.
URLs
It is important not to overlook the URL structure if SEO matters to you. URL is the address that refers to the content/pages of your website. It is one of the significant features for your page ranking on search engines. Design easy-to-remember URLs, simple and keyword-rich URLs make better sense for users and search engines. These URLs help to describe the contents of the pages. Use hyphens as spaces in the URL terms instead of underscores. Avoid capital usage in URLs because they affect page rankings. The search engine prefers lowercase URLs.
Content
Content is the key ingredient of your website that captures the user’s attention. Its structure and writing collectively should be aligned with SEO strategies so they rank higher and better in search queries. Fill your site with quality and credible content tailored according to users’ needs.
Know your target audience and design user-friendly content effectively. Use text-based content and optimize it with keywords, Meta tags, Meta descriptions to maximize searchability and generate traffic.
When designing a website, consider the proper structure for content e.g. headings, paragraphs, links plus organize it the logical way that helps users to get to what they are looking for. This helps search engines to understand what your site and its content are about for retrieval queries.
Linking
Internal links help search engines to find new contents of pages and index them. The addition of internal links to pages on the same domain and external links to pages on different domains will aid in visibility to new shareable content and show how deserving the pages are. Search engines crawl through these links and extract valuable content from the pages to index them for future search queries. This helps webpages to rank well on search engine results.
Optimized Images
Image optimizing can be effective for drawing traffic and enhance user experience. Name and describe images properly in Image alt and title attributes so that page relevancy is increased. Image loading time can be improved by enhancing its size.
Conclusion,
SEO web design ensures success and online visibility for businesses. It’s an opportunity to enhance every phase of a user’s journey on the website. Better page ranking increases the chance of better conversion rate, defining success for marketing and web design.