The field of search engine optimization continues to evolve at an alarming page; SEO techniques that defined last decade are now considered outdated. You position in search engine results pages have a major role in determining how popular your business will be. Only when your website has visitors would you be able to increase revenues and sales and hence derive a high return on your marketing investment.
Fortunately, there are many effective tactics that can help you to preserve search friendliness as well as increase website and brand visibility. Being at the top of results pages will bring more users to your site, to learn more about your products, services or other information your site offers.
Web design concepts are important to ensure our site looks good once visitors land in your pages. They determine how fast and how easy it will be for users to find what they need once they are there. By employing SEO-friendly web design, you can get the best of both worlds. The following are ten tips to show you how to build web pages that rank highly.
1. SEO-friendly URLS
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Ensure that your website URLs are SEO-optimized. This means that you should perform keyword research and only use relevant ones that flow naturally in the URL and can be related to your main offerings. Avoid having overly long URLs, and separate words using hyphens where possible. The URL should give an idea on what the page is about, as well as your business.
2. Image optimization
Optimize images as well as text within your website for better visibility. This means that you shouldn’t use large images, as they take too long to load – a downside for SEO. Maintain image sizes between 30 and 100 KB with resolutions of at least 72 dpi. When coming up with your alternate text, try to include keywords in the header images, graphics, logo images as well as buttons on every page.
3. Responsive web design
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Responsive web design is a technique that is employed where a single site can be optimally viewed on multiple devices, and it is what Google recommends for web design today. From the SEO standpoint, responsive websites allow you to have one URL for both your mobile website and desktop site, meaning that link value will be driven to the one URL rather than two. This makes back linking efforts much easier and more effective.
4. Friendly navigation
Avoid building sites with complex navigations. Users should be able to easily move around your website, and the navigation should be logically divided so that it’s easy to find the information that a user needs once they land on your site. The navigation can either be placed horizontally at the top of your pages or along the left-hand margin.
5. Use JavaScript sparingly
During web design, avoid splashing your pages with JavaScript elements. Although there have been significant improvements to search engine crawlers’ ability to interpret JavaScript, they are still not very good at comprehending it. Apart from crawling issues, JavaScript elements do not render as well in mobile devices. Your aim should be to make your website easy and comprehensible for search engines as well as users.
6. Make loading times short
From the web visitor’s perspective, how long a site takes to load determines whether or not he/she will stay on the site. Consumers are generally busy and impatient, and if your pages take too long to load, they will abandon your site for a faster site. Mobile users are much more impatient, your site should ideally take 2-3 seconds to open, and certainly no more than five. Minimize your use of JavaScript and optimize your images and graphics to reduce page-load times. You can also use smaller images, browser caching and enable compression.
7. Have a sitemap
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Sitemaps are part and parcel of good web design strategy. However, since the older times when sitemaps were adopted for search engines, they are now much more important. In addition to having easy navigation, a sitemap can lead to higher search engine visibility, and will inform crawlers about any changes that have been made on your site so that pages can be indexed quickly. Creating an XML sitemap does even more than just having your regular sitemap.
8. Choose and use relevant keywords
Keyword research is important for SEO as well as web design. Perform comprehensive keyword research to determine the phrases that are in highest demand within your niche. Do not focus on generic keywords too much; these are already in high demand and chances that you’ll rank highly are rather low. Instead, focus on local keywords and long-tail keywords which you stand a better chance at ranking for.
However, be careful not to overuse the keywords: place them naturally in your content, title tags, URLs and meta descriptions. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner which gives you a breakdown of statistics for highly-searched keywords and related phrases in your niche. Competitor research can also refine your keyword strategy.
9. Create a visual hierarchy
In order to fully make use of all your SEO assets, you should have a comprehensive understanding of the page structure. Carefully consider things like text positioning, call to actions, images and others. These are not only important for SEO, they can help to build or destroy user engagement. Many of the people that visit your site may stay on because of the logical flow, neatness and interactivity of the site. Creating visual hierarchy is about separating important elements from less important elements.
10. Integrate social media
Leverage social media to increase your online visibility as well as amplify your content.
Conclusion
Your aim should be to create a site that guides the user towards what he/she needs as well as what you want without overwhelming them in the process. It’s important to remain aware of what users’ needs are, as well as search engines best practices throughout the process of web design and site optimization. The above-mentioned strategies will help your site to stand out, increasing web visibility and sales revenue as a result.
