How to Incorporate SEO in Your Web Design
Your approach to incorporating SEO into web design should always be to build it in right from the beginning, rather than attempting to add it on later as an extra feature. Your website is absolutely critical to your business, and in almost all cases, it’s the center of your digital marketing empire, the point at which all your other digital marketing efforts direct traffic.
Of all the sources of traffic which might come to your website, the largest should generally be organic searches.. When you don’t consider SEO upfront and design it into your website, it can not only be extremely costly to incorporate it at a later time, but it generally doesn’t have the right look and feel as if it had been originally included.
Keep in mind that as your website is being initially designed, you should always be thinking about how it will be the focus of search marketing and lead generation. Another thing you have to keep in mind is how to make users happy with your website, because that’s what Google search engines favor, and of course this, in turn, leads to high rankings for your website.
Making your website SEO-friendly
Basically, a site which is SEO-friendly is one which a search engine can easily crawl and understand, with all web pages being easily accessible and easy to evaluate. Search engines make use of web crawlers to accomplish this, and to make your site SEO-friendly, you have to work with the search engines instead of against them.
Of course, not everyone has SEO optimization in mind when you’re designing and building a website, so some of these principles are overlooked to the great detriment of the designer and owner. In order to build in SEO during the design phase of a website, you have to plan carefully and take a structured approach to represent whatever your business may be, as well as the services offered by your business.
The basics
There are a few basic elements which need to be designed in when you’re building a website and trying to make it SEO-friendly. One of the first things you need to pay attention to is your primary domain. It’s okay for you to have other domains, but your primary should always relate to what your business is about, and all variations or sub-domains should accurately point to the main site.
Don’t bother trying to shoehorn keywords into your domain name, because while this may help a tiny bit, it’s not nearly as important as just being sensible about having a good domain name. If your site is being hosted by a third party, make sure that loading speed is up to snuff, because if the web pages of your site load slowly, you’ll more than likely be losing visitors in droves.
You should also have your site situated where your target audience is, so you have a better chance of reaching them. Another big influence on your website is the content management system that you use. While WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world right now, it may not be the one which best suits your business needs. Whichever one you choose, make sure it’s best for your business, rather than simply being the one that your host prefers to work with.
Crawling by search engines
As mentioned previously, it’s very important that a search engine can easily crawl your site, so it can understand what the site is all about. This means that content on every page must be readable, and that calls for text behind the scenes rather than videos, images, or flash. In order to index all your content past the home page of your site, you’ll need to set up internal links which the search engine can successfully crawl. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog to help make sure that your site can be easily crawled by any search engine.
Another very important element of web design is proper navigation, which should always work smoothly with your internal structure, your XML sitemaps, and your URLs, so as to make it clear what every page and all content is actually about. Be aware that navigation consists of more than just a system of menus which you used to transfer from page to page.
It’s also important for you to direct your users’ attention to the most relevant pages of your website, and this can be essential in raising the awareness of any additional services you intend to provide. When navigation has been designed incorrectly on your website, the user should never even have to think about it. It should be so obvious and intuitive that there is a flow from one page to the next, or to the most relevant content you want your users to see.
Master web designer
If you don’t want to take a chance on overlooking some of these critical components of great SEO web design, your best bet is to contact UpAndSocial, the master Boston web design company, which will ensure that your site is designed and constructed according to all the most important SEO principles, while also conveying to the world what your company is all about.
