Although designing a physically beautiful, functional website that meets all the needs of your client is a great asset to any business, it’s simply not enough if you’d like your business to reap the many benefits of having a strong online presence. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an absolutely necessary measure if you’d like to improve the visibility of your website through online search results. With SEO being a key marketing tool for the vast majority of online businesses, it’s important to create a website design with search engine optimization in mind. There are a number of website design practices that also make for great SEO, so if you’re looking to design or redesign your website to make it more SEO friendly, we’ve compiled a list of easy tips that you might like to use.
Photo by Renjith Krishnan at freedigitalphotos.net
Use Keywords
When an online search is carried out, the terms entered into the search tool are known as keywords. If you’re incorporating the wrong keywords into your website design, you are most likely missing out on a vast number of potential visitors, clients and customers who will never find you. For this reason, it’s crucial to discover what it is that your target market is searching for online, and incorporate these specific keywords into your web design. This could be done in the form of content such as informational articles or blog posts that will appear on search engine results.
Make it Search Engine Friendly
Ensuring that the navigation of your website is search engine friendly is an essential step if you’re looking to get more visitors as a result of search engines. A common fault with many websites is that the links are in the form of images rather than text, meaning that it’s harder for search engines to find the site, and often impossible to find it at all. Making sure that all links and buttons are text-based rather than image-based is just one way to ensure that the structure of your site is designed in such a way that it’s easy for search engines to follow.
Choose Your URL and File Names Carefully
As well as having a URL that’s easy for your customers to both type and remember, it’s also important to note that having an SEO friendly URL also goes a long way when it comes to obtaining more visits and customers from search engines. Using keywords in the URL is also a handy tactic used by many professional web designers such as Sioux Falls web design. When it comes to file names, you can also make them more SEO friendly through the use of descriptive keywords. For example, tagging or naming the images on your site can make all the difference when it comes to your images appearing in Google Image Search results, for example.
Are you a web designer who’d like to add to this list? Or, would you like to share how you made your website design more SEO friendly? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.
