10 Ways to Make SEO & Web Design Work Together
Albeit web design pertains to graphic design and programming, it is not just the job of web developers. Marketers need to be involved in every step of the process.
Web design is not just all about aesthetics. The mistakes in web design are often caused by web designers not thinking about search engine optimization (SEO). Web design should appeal not just to humans but search engine crawlers, as well. A low SEO ranking will not drive traffic and sales to your business.
Web design has geared away from merely being a visually-oriented task to being more metric driven. Compromising SEO while in the web design stage, can be compared to a business without a marketing strategy.
So how can you make SEO and jewelry store web designs work together? Here are 10 ways they are used together. Remember to keep SEO top of mind when creating your web design to make the collaboration between SEO and web design seamless.
1. Mobile-friendly Web Design
Anyone knowledgeable about SEO or web design knows the importance of making a website mobile-friendly. In 2021, 55% of website traffic came from mobile devices.
As of September 2022, 58.72% of website traffic came from mobile devices. This means over half of your target audience accesses the web through their mobile phones.
It is estimated that by 2025, three-fourths of the world will access the web only through their smartphones.
Google made mobile-friendliness one of the top-ranking factors in 2015. In 2017, the search engine started mobile-first indexing. Google views mobile-friendliness as an important factor in SERPs.
It is therefore essential that your web design is mobile-friendly unless you want to alienate half of your users. Have a mobile version of your website instead of making your website work on mobile devices.
2. Web Loading Speed
Has your website not been ranking well on SERPs? It may be that your website is too slow. Your website should load in three seconds at the most, otherwise, your bounce rate will increase because visitors will abandon your site.
A fast-loading website is even more important on mobile devices because users are less likely to wait.
A fast-loading website is not only the concern of users but also of Google. Page speed influences the ability of Google to crawl your website. If Google crawls fewer pages because of page speed, you will not have as many pages indexed and it will be impossible for these pages to rank on SERPs.
Page speed is one of the most important features of technical SEO. So, remove unnecessary plugins, optimize your images, enable browser cache, etc. to increase page speed. The cleaner your website, the faster its page speed.
3. Codes
There are a few code options to render your website’s major design elements. The most commonly used codes are CSS and HTML so it is best to stick with them. Flash looks cool but they are too challenging to optimize and will have lesser chances of ranking high in SERPs.
4. URL Structure
Your URL structure should be designed around your SEO strategy. Each URL slug should be short and include the keywords you want to rank in Google’s SERPs when optimizing your website.
Make sure to do keyword research for each page you include in your website design. This can help Google understand the keyword(s) you want the web pages to rank for.
Use focused keywords for your URL to ensure the slugs are easy to remember when users are looking for a specific page.
5. Easy-to-Read Design
Content, lots of them, will make your website rank high. Yes, visual elements should be the main focus, but it is also important that your website is easy-to-read. This means using the right font size, style, and size.
A white-colored font on a white background or black on black, too small or big text, or perhaps hard-to-read fonts creates terrible websites. These website elements will turn people away quickly.
Readability is another major ranking factor. If visitors cannot read the copy on your website, they are not getting anything valuable.
6. Image Optimization
Optimize images after uploading them. Optimized images make web pages load faster and, therefore create better browsing experiences.
You can optimize images by ensuring they have descriptive file names. Alt tags tell search engines the nature of the images. Lastly, small images also load faster than large images.
7. Website Navigation
Simple navigation reduces the chances of visitors getting dazed by all the information and content on your website. Easy-to-navigate websites help users find what they are looking for. It is also great for ranking high in Google.
8. Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file that contains your web pages, videos, files, and everything on your website. A sitemap helps Google crawl your web pages. It tells search engines which are the most important pages and helps users easily navigate your website.
9. Easy-to-Index Content
Valuable content that is easy to read, with winning keywords, and a good structure makes crawling and indexing easy for Google. A good web design presents content without any interruption and, therefore, boosts ranking.
An easy-to-crawl web page should be in HTML text format so Google can easily understand what the page is about.
10. Meta Description
The title tags which appear in the header of the webpage present the subject matter of the page. The title tag is also a clickable link. While it does not impact organic rankings so much, missing or poorly written meta-descriptions negatively affects SEO results.
Optimizing meta-descriptions is an important element of search engine optimization we design.
Final Thoughts
The business landscape is highly competitive, so generating more traffic to your website should be a major concern. A website that looks good and remains SEO-friendly should be able to attract a lot of visitor traffic.
A well-designed and SEO-friendly website is built by bridging the gap between web design and SEO. Optimizing your website makes web design and SEO work together. Usability and SEO fully optimize your website to improve search results.
The ultimate goal of an SEO-friendly web design is to provide a great user experience. While web design focuses more on the aesthetic elements of a website, SEO emphasizes on aspects that will make the website rank high on search engines.
Both web design and SEO work to achieve the same results- to help your business succeed.
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