Can your customers figure out what your business has to offer within 3 seconds of them landing on your web page? Is the design of your pricing simple to comprehend? Can they sail through your blog with complete ease?
If your answer to all of the above questions is ‘NO’, then maybe you should consider tweaking the design of your website and focusing more on its optimization.
Yes, it is of utmost importance for you to have a spectacular website design if you want your online business to be successful. But, it doesn’t stop there!
If you want to increase the number of customers visiting your website, it is equally essential to have good SEO rankings.
So, what is it that you can do to improve the design of your website?
To help you with that, in this article we have mentioned a list of 6 SEO tactics that will assist you in refining the design of your website and making it search engine-friendly.
Have a Search Engine-friendly Site Navigation
When a website is readable and well-structured, it creates a smooth navigation for search engines. This might sound like a huge task, but you can definitely simplify it by taking the user experience into consideration well before building the website.
Also, keep in mind to develop content that is just 3 clicks away. User testing from Safari SEO Sydney found that customers end up hitting the exit button if they’re unable to find the information they’ve been searching for.
In the same way, if Google is unable to look through you title, alt, and meta tags which helps it understand your website, then it will hamper your search engine rankings.
Add Readable Content for the Search Engines
Content is known as the soul of your website and that is exactly what the search engines look for. So, as a web designer, when you are building a website see to it that your content is well-structured and includes links, headings and paragraphs.
You must also properly plan your website’s design stages so that it doesn’t face any issues in Google’s search results. For instance, do not add photographs or illustrations if you are not making use of CSS image replacement method.
Refurbish Your Pages by Adding New Content
If there is a blog on your site, make sure you are creating some space for snippets of your recent posts in all the existing pages.
Search engines are always on the lookout for new content on your website, which is why it makes sense to keep updating it time and time again. Also, it lets the search engines know that your website is active.
Besides, when the content keeps changing the frequency of crawling by search engine increases. But avoid displaying the entire post as that might lead to plagiarism issues.
Create Meta Data that Is Unique
Your keywords, page titles, and descriptions must always be different. Majority of designers develop a template and leave it be without making any changes to its meta data. Due to this, every other page on your website ends up using the same placeholder details.
So, ensure that all your pages have their own unique meta data since it assists search engines to get a better understanding of your website’s structure.
Have a Website Design that Is Mobile-friendly
All of us spend majority of our time fidgeting on our mobile phones; not to mention they have become an integral part of our lives. With that being the case, it has become important for website owners to ensure that their site’s design is mobile-friendly.
Moreover, it has been noticed that nearly 87% of customers use their smartphones to search for information and only those websites following the ‘mobile first’ strategy have higher rankings.
So, it is safe to say that user engagement through mobile phones will help increase website traffic.
Keep It Clean and to the Point
You are likely to come across several excellent SEO tactics, but only some of them will tell you how being simple and relevant is the key to an amazing UX.
Also, with regards to website design, it is better to keep it simple and clean, and include only the necessary elements. This way, you can avoid creating a mess and get rid of things that could possibly be a distraction to your user.
You should always make use of as much white space as possible so that it doesn’t strain the user’s eye. Besides, it will make their transition from one point to another really quick and easy.
Conclusion
It is a big plus to have SEO knowledge and relevant skills, especially in the realm of website development and designing since it is directly linked to the marketing world. Also, with these skills you get the opportunity to convert a ‘no-name’ website into the most popular one.
