SEO and web design are two elements that should gel together. The design of a website creates an impact on how the visitors perceive your brand. It can convey the brand image and messaging and also inspires the visitors to take action. SEO increases the website exposure and provides the right opportunity to get discovered by the right set of visitors. If you are looking for the best SEO services, you could find various agencies that offer different types of SEO, website and digital marketing services. However, the best web design agency would also offer various website-related services. You can shortlist some of the best agencies and then pick the right one that you feel is the best.
To get the most out of website performance on search engines, take a look at what the designers should know about SEO for web design.
- Popular search engines would index a website’s mobile version
Most of the online traffic comes via mobile devices which also includes searches on search engines. To meet the requirements of mobile users that are increasing day by day, mobile versions of websites were introduced sometime back. This means that the search engines would review the mobile version of a website to rank and index it. By looking at it from an SEO perspective, the website responsiveness to mobile devices might impact the performance of a brand on search engines in many ways. Responsive web design can provide a smooth user experience. It means that the content on your website can adapt to different screens and devices. This is known as usability, which is one of the many ranking factors of search engines. It requires the designers to focus mainly on their approach towards designing websites that provide a fast and smooth user experience across various devices. You should also observe the behaviour of your audience and their preferences by analysing the search pattern. You should understand what devices people use, the type of content they interact with and how they consume different types of content. This is the only way to create a responsive website that would meet the expectations and needs of the visitors.
- Understand the search intent for succeeding in SEO
The keywords can be very important when it comes to SEO strategy. They are about ideas and topics around which the content is created. The way content is optimised for keywords has changed. Search engines do not focus on the exact match search phrases. They only try to understand the intent behind each search query and the type of search results they expect to see. There are different types of user intent. Someone is looking for information, their queries would be conversational. Others would look for business locations as they would want to visit a restaurant or a local store. People also look for guidelines on how to do something or where to make a particular type of purchase. A marketer inside matches each keyword with the right user intent and optimises the pages that would bring in maximum website traffic which would convert. Web design for SEO should address various stages of user intent. Make use of various keyword data to analyse the search terms which might lead to the website of the brand and would fulfil the intentions of your visitors. The website design should be intuitive and user friendly. Provide a good experience and high-quality content at every stage of a customer’s journey and should also fulfil their intention of finding an answer or solution for a query. This would bring in better user experience metrics like stronger rankings.
- The structure of the website can make an impact on rankings and organic clicks
One of the important aspects of SEO for web design is on-page SEO. It is simple for almost anyone to handle without technical knowledge or tools.
- Title tags
A title tag could be the first thing a user might see in the search engine result pages. How quick they identify your website would match their intent. Hence you have to optimise the title tags strategically. Overly optimised title tags with a stuffing of keywords would not work for search engines or audiences. You can add keywords and the beginning of a title tag, add keywords naturally, keep it short ideally about 50 to 60 characters, make use of a divider to separate elements and make use of the same title tag optimisation tactic over the entire website.
- Meta descriptions
They are very important as they can tell your audience in detail what your page is all about and encourage them to click and open the website. To gain a click a meta description should be informative, brief and well written. The keywords should be included wherever it is relevant. However, you should make sure that they do not harm the overall readability of the meta descriptions. Spamming the elements would affect the rankings negatively and the users would get discouraged from clicking the link. Hence, make use of the elements carefully.
- Heading tags
They help in building a solid page structure and creating an informational hierarchy. When you pair meta descriptions with optimised title tags and the content, heading tags would make the content more logical and easier to follow. They would allow the search engines to effortlessly categorise and index the content in such cases. If you use the heading tags properly, your SEO efforts would be fruitful. H1 is an important header on the page. It needs to be compulsorily optimised using main keywords. Also, H2 and H3 tags can break up large text into smaller ones and make it crisp and clear.
- Optimise images for accessibility and increase speed
Optimising videos and images you design for the website can play an important role in the SEO strategy, especially in the case of online retailers and bloggers. This could be a good opportunity that would help in driving more traffic to the website and increase the visibility after brand online. Pick the right format for images. JPEG could be a good choice when it comes to photos while PNG could be a good option for transparent photo backgrounds. Reduce the image size. Large files might cause longer website loading time and more search engines give priority to the quick loading of websites.
