Search engine optimization isn’t a second thought for businesses today to gain the attention of Google and other search engines. But do you know that getting attention from the search engines starts at the very beginning of your website design? Yes, that is true! No matter how good your website is designed, but if it is not optimized for search engines, hardly any business gets a chance to hit the charts in search engine rankings.
So, how to improve your website design without compromising the SEO quotient? Well, adjusting your existing website takes extensive efforts, but enabling a few best practices keeping in mind the SEO marketing while improving your website design could be a substantial time-saver.
Lacing local SEO optimization in the early website development phase of your website may bring great results. However, if you are a little late in search engine optimization, SEO website design guidelines discussed here in this post can help you rank higher without breaking the customer experience.
SEO-friendly Website Design Guidelines:
Search engine optimization and website design work together effortlessly if the website design agency follows the basic guidelines discussed below.
- Work on website architecture
Believe it or not, but website structures have a significant impact on the way your site appears in search engines. Website architecture is all about how all the web pages on your website are linked with each other. If you will get in touch with any SEO consultant, you will come to know that simple website architecture is all preferred by the popular search engines.
If you have architecture like the one shown above, Google or any other search engines will find it difficult to index the web pages of your site. Therefore, it is important that you get website architecture corrected with the help of a website design agency.
- Sensible and SEO-friendly URLs
When you have started your online business, your website might be having a limited set of URLs, but as you grow, the URLs will increase for new sections or pages of the website. It is possible that the URLs might contain numbers or any vague terms, which makes them less meaningful. This will heavily affect the way search engines follow the new URLs.
For example,
www.sample.com
www.sample.com/s123/
www.sample.com/s1222/21s
The above set of URLs are difficult for the search engines to understand and are less human-friendly. Therefore, it is crucial to use sensible naming conventions to provide more context for search engines and users. Make sure that the web design agency you hire follows this while adding and designing any new pages for your website.
- Make web pages fully indexable
It is very important that Google can index all the web pages and contents of your website to make it visible in the search results. Here’s what you can do to make your website pages indexable:
- Use Alt Text for the images on your website. No search engine understands or identifies the images. Therefore, any local SEO optimization service provider will suggest you use the alt attribute to describe what an image is about.
- Don’t hide any content. Many times, website design often uses several forms and expandable menus where some of the contents are hidden behind it. This can add difficulties for the search engines to index such hidden content. Therefore, it is important that you ask the website design agency to help you keep all your content visible and open to help search engines crawl such contents easily.
- Ensure the seamless navigation
Navigation of your website is equally important when it comes to search engine optimization. It is important that navigation of your website should not make the visitors think. And if the users don’t find what they are looking for on your website, they will simply move to the next website of your competitor. Therefore, make sure your site has neat and clean navigation.
- Canonical tags are useful
While designing your website, it is possible that you end up having different pages having similar content. However, you want a specific page to be considered for SEO marketing. Also, it is important that you don’t get caught in the trap of duplicate content. And that’s where canonical tags come to rescue! It will tell search engines whether to index any page or not. Make sure you ask an SEO consultant to use canonical tags as and where applicable to improve your website design for search engine optimization.
- User experience is everything
Do you know that 89% of buyers shop from your competitor in the event of poor user experience? Well, it is always important to understand that you optimize your site to fulfill the user needs. But it is more important to know that Google search engine is also one of your users and it is the only user who can help you make your site visible. And user experience is the key to rank your site higher in the search results. To improve the user experience, you can simply follow a few tricks like:
- Think of a mobile-first design.
- Go for descriptive page titles
- And work on link building strategies
Closing notes…
Remember, SEO works best in conjunction with website design, and improving your design is not a daunting task if you follow these guidelines. There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to designing an SEO-friendly website. But it requires SEO services from the experts. Want to make your website design SEO-compatible? Get in touch with us now!
