How To Design SEO Friendly Website For your Business?

The website has replaced the brick and mortar store. It is even replacing some of the employees and departments in traditional offices, as it serves as a counter for selling wares.

However, its usefulness depends on the competition with others serving the same industry or targeting the same audience.

It is SEO that enables your website to compete reasonably online. SEO requires you to look at three elements in your digital marketing strategy. 

1. Website design– it refers to the number of pages, their structure, and interaction. A website design should be natural and designed with both the user and search engines in mind. 
2. Content– content guides search engine spiders when answering the questions by online users. It also helps the users to find answers to their queries. 
3. Competition– what are your competitors doing on their websites? Always remember that you are competing with other sites for the same audience. You have to remain ahead of them if your page is to rank top. 

Ranking on search engines and the amount of traffic you get will depend on your SEO strategy. There is no static strategy you can use to enhance your online presence.

The plan has to involve continuous reviews to incorporate new algorithms. But the question is – why should you make a website SEO friendly?

Why A Website Should Be SEO Friendly?

Enhance Customer Experience

SEO strategies aim at improving the customer experience. Good customer experience is crucial in guaranteeing loyalty and winning return customers to the website. It makes information and pages easy to find on the site.

Good customer experience also acts as an endorsement. If search engines realize that people spend more time on your website or click onto more pages, your ranking will improve. 

Capture The Attention Of Search Spiders

SEO looks outwards to align with the requirements of search engines. For instance, the SEO strategy should consider the algorithms in use at the moment.

Search engines update their algorithms regularly, meaning that your plan cannot remain static. If search engine spiders view your website favorably, your ranking will improve.

Increase Engagement

The main aim of digital marketing is to interact with your customers. These engagements will result in higher sales or brand exposure.

Your SEO strategy should help you reach more people, get comments, allow them to spend more time on your site, and compel them to share your content. With increased engagement, your ranking will improve, and you will get the results you desire. 

Rank Higher

High ranking comes with more exposure and higher chances of selling. Your brand will also be more competitive compared to your rivals.

To achieve a higher ranking, you have to work on your content, website, and consider the strategies used by your competition. A higher ranking is also an incredible source of organic traffic to your site. It results in excellent return-on-investment.

Deliver The Best ROI

Online presence and all SEO related activities are investments that must bring returns. The expenditure on digital presence must bear the desired fruits of higher ranking, increased engagement, and favorable view by search engine spiders. When all these targets and strategies fall into place, you get the best return on investment. 

How To Create SEO Friendly Website?

If SEO is this important for a brand and website, what strategies should web designers use to achieve an SEO optimized site? Here are a few strategies to consider.

Make Navigation Easy

Websites aim at providing information about your products and services to potential buyers. Research indicates that visitors to a website favor a platform where information is easy to find. Movement from one page to the other should also be easy, natural, and seamless.

The best strategy to make navigation easy is to provide a site map on the home page. It allows visitors to click on any page from the landing or home page. Such a provision means that finding this information will be easy and seamless. 

Choose A Domain That Is SEO Friendly

The domain name should reflect industry perception and the frequent searches the target market makes about your products. If the website is about the software or IT services, choose a domain name that reflects IT services. The target audience can identify with your online brand and, therefore, find your website to be more reliable. 

Choose a domain name that allows you to stand out in the industry. The name chosen should also be unique, yet inspire the confidence of potential clients. Choose a name that features somewhere in the searched terms whenever the target audience is looking for information about the industry. 

Make Your Content Light and Captivating

The loading speed of a website is an incredible part of any SEO strategy. It will depend on the nature of the content available on the site and the features used in web design. A light website loads fast to deliver the best user experience. 

Use a writing or content presentation style that makes it easy for readers to extract information from your website. For instance, use titles and subtitles to indicate where specific information can be found. People spend more time on such a site and will always return whenever they need more information. 

Is The Website Mobile Responsive?

Website users access these platforms using a range of gadgets. They range from phones to laptops and desktop computers.

However, they have multiple operating systems and coding languages. Your website must allow access through these numerous devices without losing the integrity of the information captured. 

It is especially important to create a mobile-friendly website. Research indicates that more internet users are accessing websites on mobile than many other traditional gadgets. A website that is not mobile-responsive will lose while in competition with others in the same field. 

Connect To Social Media

Create options for your website to connect with social media. Social media is an excellent publicity and engagement tool. It will help you to direct more traffic to your website, resulting in enhanced visibility and increased chances to sell. 

Social media offers a variety of options to diversify your content. Some help you to promote your business using images while others are for heavy text usage. There are social media platforms for videos and short-text content.

Variety in social media also helps you to reach a broader range of audiences. You will be serving all your customers through their preferred channel. 

Caption All Your Images And Videos

Winning SEO strategies are heavily reliant on the perception by search engine spiders. It means that your performance will depend on how these search-spiders view your content.

Unfortunately, the technology to read the information on images and videos is still primitive. As a result, you still have to read the details on behalf of the search engine spiders. Captioning is the only sure way to ascertain that these search spiders capture the information. 

Use relevant keywords to caption your images and videos. Such captioning helps the photos and videos to rank during organic searches. It also helps them to be competitive when people are searching for specific content like videos and pictures. 

Add Fresh Content Regularly

Search engines love fresh content. They will notice and rank lowly any old articles. Your target audience is also looking for new insights every time they click onto the site.

If they find the same old pages with every click, their urge to click onto your website will fade.

Hire professional writers to create new and captivating information. Unpublish old articles and replace them with new and exciting blog posts.

Rewrite and spin ancient articles to add new details and refresh your mode of presentation. It gives your website a fresh feel and makes it attractive to your potential audience. 

Use Internal And External Links

Internal and external links build the confidence of your website. They act as endorsements of your content and brand. Each type of link offers particular advantages. 

• Internal-links- they connect different pages on the same website. It is a way of introducing the visitor to other pages within your site. It will increase the time a visitor spends on the site, enhance engagement, and boost the chances of up-selling or cross-selling. 
• External-links- the links give search engines the impression that your page is trusted. Visitors will also consider your page valuable because it is connecting them to useful resources online. 

Use links sparingly and professionally. Some links are considered unprofessional and will lead to penalties. The reader must find value in the links, or else they will become a turn-off to readers. 

The perfect SEO strategy is one that is informed by your current triumphs and challenges. Review and update the plan regularly to incorporate emerging trends. Hire an SEO expert to work on your website and guide your digital marketing strategy.

Watch what your competition is doing online and match their plans. A winning SEO strategy must make your brand unique. It makes it easy for your target audience to identify with your brand beyond making it competitive online. 

6 Common Web Design Mistakes

Are web design mistakes affecting the rankings of your website? SEO friendly web design is critical for ranking on Google and also to keep your visitors glued.

Having a beautiful website doesn’t guarantee traffic. If your website isn’t optimized for SEO, it will hurt the organic rankings.

If you want to drive traffic, your website should be search-engine friendly. While you’re focusing only on the visual elements, make sure that you optimize your website not only for the users but also for search engines.

Here is the list of six serious web design mistakes that can impact your organic rankings dearly and act as a hindrance to achieving the top positions on search engines.

Web Design Mistake 1: Wrong Implementation of Header Tags

A number of repetitive heading tags at multiple locations is considered as one of the significant issues of website design. More than 50% of the websites face the problem of the wrong implementation of header tags.

Web designers don’t overlook this issue. Well, this thing has a severe negative impact on your website’s SEO.

If you want to improve the chances of ranking in the top positions on search engines, make sure that you add appropriate H1 and H2 tags.

While adding these tags, remember to add keywords you’d like to target the most. This would enable your website to rank higher in SERPs.

Web Design Mistake 2: Non-Responsive Design

In present times, most people are using smartphones. So, you can’t ignore to design your website in such a way that it’s mobile-friendly.

The Mobile-friendliness of a website is one of the ranking factors for all search engines. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, then keep in mind that you need to ask your designer to fix this issue as early as possible.

A website should always have a non-responsive design. This is because this would help you reduce the bounce rate on your website.

Web Design Mistake 3: Heavy Media Files

Well, true that images play an essential role in improving user engagement. However, if images you added are large in size, it would take a toll on its search engine optimization.

Images with higher resolution would lower down Page Loading Speed of your website, thus impact the overall score of SEO.

This is why one of the best ways to make the images smaller in size is to compress them and resize them. Using Google PageSpeed Insights tools, you can easily check how much time your website is taking to load completely.

Once you’re done with this, and if you found that the speed is slow, use the CDN server.

This is one of the best techniques to prevent your websites from heavy images and other media files.

Web Design Mistake 4: Images with Text

For making the website look attractive and engaging, you add text to the images. Well, images having text is liked by users, but search engines don’t like it.

Undoubtedly, search engines love content! However, when it comes to images with text, the search engine can’t see the text in your images.

For this reason, make sure that you don’t repeat this website designing mistake, and ignore adding text to your images.

This leads to bad UX, which ultimately hampers the SEO of your website. If you add images, optimize your images by adding proper alt tags and descriptions, instead of adding text on images.

Web Design Mistake 5: Short and Thin Content

Usually, the webmasters miss the counterpart, to make their website look good. It’s important to add lengthy content to the webpage.

However, search engines mainly focus on websites having good content. For this reason, if you’ve only thin content on your website, you’re hurting its SEO.

It’s a fact that websites with a good piece of content would rank in the top positions of SERPs.

Web Design Mistake 6: Infinite Scrolling

One of the popular elements of web 2.0 is “infinite scrolling.” This is the feature that loads more content when a user scrolls down.

Well, yes this is an effective way to make the user stay on a website. Doing this, you’ll be able to increase the average of time a user will spend on your website.

However, when it comes to web design, it’s one of the reasons for hurting the SEO of your website. For this reason, it’s essential to implement it in such a way that it would work effectively.

If you don’t set the pagination for the webpage, it will make it difficult for crawlers/search engine bots to crawl them. So, make sure that you set the pagination correctly.

Conclusion

All the above mentioned are six common web designing mistakes that you should avoid. These mistakes can hurt the SEO of your site.

If you’re planning to design a new website, or merely revamping the existing one, make sure that you aren’t making these web design mistakes.

Ultimately, this would better the SEO of your website and would make your website rank on the top.