How To Design An SEO-Friendly Website
Optimizing one’s site for search engines is undeniably an essential component of establishing a robust online presence. Incorporating SEO-friendly features into the design, content, and user experience translates to higher traffic and better search engine rankings. There are numerous strategies website owners can apply to make their website more search engine friendly.
While it is possible to maintain a website without using any optimization techniques, such websites lose out on organic traffic and get ignored by search engines, online surfers, and customers alike. This is simply because websites that cooperate with the search engine algorithms tend to take a larger slice of the web traffic.
But the bigger question owners should ask themselves is how to design a website that bodes well with search engines? The tips below may come in handy for website owners looking to step up their SEO game:
1.Keyword research plays an integral role in driving traffic to your site
It’s a no-brainer that proper keyword research and natural integration of those keywords into quality content drive quality traffic to one’s website. Marketers and web admins should invest their time in cracking the exact keywords users are looking for and seamlessly integrate them into their content. This automatically helps search engines rank such websites higher. One should start by brainstorming the keywords they would search for when looking for a desired service or product.
Finding relevant keywords that fit the product or service description one’s business offers is an excellent place to start. Several tools also assist in determining the relevance of keywords that might also come in handy. Tools that check backlinks help determine if the backlinking strategy is working effectively on one’s website.
2.View your website from the perspective of a search engine
Google AI crawls through websites looking for relevant content or information with regards to the keywords being searched. As the AI does that, it also simultaneously indexes webpages that are easily readable by the algorithm. Often what users see on a website is different compared to how a search engine views a website. While dynamic formats of displaying content on a website can seem attractive for users, these formats tend to get ignored by search engines.
This means that even with the right content, websites suffer the risk of getting ignored simply because the AI cannot understand the content. Therefore, website owners should utilize tools in viewing one’s website from a search engine’s perspective. Restructuring the website design to make it more search engine-friendly can help determine its success in the long-run.
3.Complications are never good
Website structures are the digital architecture on which the business’s vision rests. A website should have a presentable, easy to navigate, and logical structure. The objective is to make it intuitive for search engines and visitors. One can start by creating a map or an informal structure of the website based on clear goals that the website owner wishes to achieve. One can adopt a couple of strategies, including deciding where to place certain groups of similar information and weaving relevant pieces together through internal linking.
While optimizing the website structure is considered necessary, the optimization strategies one employs should differ for both search engines and users. Creating attractive and eye-catching pieces of content can generate user interest, but as argued earlier, search engines will ignore them. Therefore high-quality, dynamic content should be balanced by crawlable links with relevant keywords.
4.To optimize for desktop or to optimize for mobile? Always the latter!
Desktop computers had their place in creating the internet audience that became the center of the dot-com boom. But with the advent of smartphones, the popularity of desktops has taken a back seat. Research suggests that smartphones have taken the lead in being the most popular devices for user searches. Why does this insight matter for websites? Simply because now they have to consider the importance of their mobile versions. A mobile-friendly design tends to go a long way in generating organic traffic and potential success through rankings for a website owner.
Mobile traffic is more responsive compared to desktop traffic as the retention rates are lower for mobile users. It means that users browsing on mobile tend to switch between webpages faster compared to desktop users. Therefore, it is equally important to optimize for mobile-friendly content, especially for websites that draw a large segment of their traffic from smartphone users.
5.Slow and steady loses the race!
Being patient while maintaining consistency works well as a strategy when considering the macro-objectives on a good website. However, suppose the webpages of one’s site take several minutes to load. In that case, the chances are that users will instantly switch to another webpage that loads instantly. No visitor would want to waste their time staring at load screens in the year of 5G technology and superfast internet. Moreover, Google AI also considers a website’s loading speed when it determines its rank on SERPs.
This means that if a user has to wait incessantly to gain access to content on your website, the AI will automatically push the site down in rankings. This holds especially true for smartphone visitors because their patience levels tend to be lower than that of desktop visitors. Therefore, website owners should analyze their loading times and investigate any elements that might slow down the site. Moreover, investing in faster servers is always recommended.
6.Make your website URL friends with the search engine
Many website owners tend to pay little to no attention to the URLs of their webpages. While in the grand scheme of things, one may argue that URLs do not hold as much importance in comparison to SEO. However, it would be unfair to make this claim because fine lines such as URL planning can create compounded results such as more significant traffic and better rankings.
A sensible and well-thought URL for a web page tends to be search engine-friendly and provides context for web traffic. They act as clues for search engines as they help determine the topic of that particular web page. Simple and easy-to-remember URLs are the bread and butter to rank higher.
Final Words
The objective is to understand why website design holds significant importance, especially when generating quality traffic. Moreover, a well-designed website with SEO tends to be favored by search engines over generic ones. The above six tips will help website owners decipher the factors that matter when building a successful website.
Keyword research, being search engine friendly, having a logical structure, optimizing mobile, faster loading times, and simple URLs are a few strategies to achieve the goal. Some might argue that these strategies are also interconnected and assist in delivering holistic results.