Most people look online for a product or service before they make a purchase, even if they make that purchase offline. They look to see if your company has an online presence as having a website is considered to be a sign of professionalism and legitimacy.
If you have reviews or testimonials on your website, potential customers will want to read them. It is for this reason you want to make sure your website shows up on the first page of search results. People rarely look beyond the first page.
How do you make sure your website shows up on page one? Design your website around strategic search engine optimization (SEO).When it comes to your website, it is important to keep web design with SEO in mind.
If used correctly, SEO is a crucial marketingtool for online businesses.
SEO Tips for Website Design
What is SEO?
SEO refers to the process of getting traffic from what is called organic (versus paid) search results on search engines.
Your online content including your web pages and videos are ranked by search engines based on relevancy.
As a business, you want to make sure your website and other content is found in search and this is why SEO is so important.
Be Specific
It is fairly common knowledge that a confused mind does nothing. What does this mean with regards to your website?
If it is not clear what your business message is in a few seconds, the person on your website will leave and move onto the next result in their search.
Make sure to be clear in your primary business message and do the necessary keyword research when developing your website content.
Mobile Responsive
Most people access the web through their mobile devices. As a result, Google started penalizing non-mobile sites in 2015.
Do you want to lose traffic to your website? Of course, you don’t. You need to make sure your website is designed to be both mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive.
Site Navigation
If someone has trouble finding information on your website, they will leave. Make sure your site navigation is clear, easy to navigate, and simple. If you design your site so that people have to search for something, know that they won’t.
Site Speed
Google considers the speed your site loads as part of its search algorithm. You need to make sure your site loads quickly for search reasons and to make sure users actually view your site.
If it takes too long to load, most users won’t hang around waiting for it. They will move on to the next site.
There are several ways to make sure your site doesn’t take too long to load. Make sure your database and images are optimized.
Large image sizes are notorious for slowing down your website’s loading time. There are many free sites online to help you reduce or compress the size of your images without losing quality.
Alternative Image Tags
Images can be engaging and attractive to visitors. In addition to making sure your images don’t slow down your website, you want to make sure they help your site in search engines.
What does this mean? Search engines can’t read images, they only read thetext. Make sure you give your images meaningful and relevant titles.
The more clues you give to search engines about your content, the higher the chances it will be found by users.
Calls-to-Action
If you don’t tell your website visitors what you want them to do, they don’t do it. Make sure you give them clear and easy-to-understand calls-to-action.
If your website design makes it difficult for people to check out, opt-in, or request more information, you can pretty much rest assured they won’t do it.
Links
Whatever you do, do not buy links. Yes, inbound and outbound links will help your site with SEO but when Google finds out that your links are not legitimate, your site will be punished harshly.
Be careful when you link to other sites because your link is similar to a vote for that site. If you are careful in your selection of outbound links, they can be valuable.
Suggestions for internal links are including a blogroll, link list, or resources page on your website. You can also link to blog posts on your site.
Content is Still King
While it is important to pay close attention to SEO, you also have to remember that you are writing content that will be read by humans, not just bots.
Make sure your content doesn’t sound like it was written by a robot. Write like a human being for human beings.
