SEO and Web Design - How Can You Make Them Work Together?
How SEO and Web Design Work Together to Boost Your Marketing. Improved customer engagement. SEO improves the visibility and credibility of your website and bring more website traffic. Professional web design and SEO work required hand in hand to make that happen.
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| Make Web Design & SEO Work Together for the Success |
Many companies hardly understand the effect that the design of their websites can have on their SEO and visibility in general. As such, most focus only on creating quality content that attracts links and social shares but almost never put enough effort to enhance user experience.
For your business to achieve optimal levels of success, there’s a need for your SEO and web design efforts to complement each other. Once you're able to bring the two processes together seamlessly, the result is an easy to find, user-friendly website that converts well.
In this article, we explain how you can make SEO and web design work together for your overall business success. Some of the areas we’ll cover include content management, site performance, and link structure.
A. Content
Content is such a broad term in website management, often encompassing aspects like text, images, and multimedia content such as videos and audios.
- Text content - Search engines are considered to be generally lazy. This is why most digital marketers recommend that important content including H1 headings, key navigation links, and primary keywords are placed at the beginning of a page or post. This way, web spiders can quickly scan and understand whatever is published on that page as soon as they visit it and before they can hop to other sites.
- Images - The size of your images can impact your site speed and by extension its SEO performance. For best results, optimise all images uploaded to your website to ensure they have the right dimensions and format. If possible, use SVGs which are not only often smaller but also look clearer than the more common JPGs and PNGs.
- Videos - A lot of misconceptions exist regarding the impact of video content on SEO. For example, some marketers argue that only text-based content improves the visibility of a website.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Videos can help to boost engagement on your site and increase visitors’ dwell time. And as you possibly already know, dwell time is one of the major factors that influence ranking on search results.
Remember to host your videos on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo and embed them on your site to ensure minimal effect on site speed.
Additional content ideas
- Limit the number of fonts - Web fonts play a vital role in enhancing your site’s beauty and brand. However, including several different font types can negatively affect your load speed.
- Use animations - Using interactive elements such as animations is another proven way to increase user engagement. Add animated tools such as hover effects and dynamic infographics to improve user experience and ultimately boost your rankings.
- Calls to action - Calls to action help you convert visitors into action takers, and as a result enable you achieve your goals for a particular page or post. Put these elements in strategic positions on your page and keep testing with different versions (based on words used and color schemes) to find a few that convert best.
B. Site performance
With multiple studies showing that the average attention span of humans has been on a constant decline over the years, it helps to have a site that loads lightning fast. Users will be quick to abandon your website if it takes ages to load, resulting in increased bounce-back rates. Google hates this and will de-rank you in favor of your better-optimized competitors.
So, how can you avoid this?
Well, by simply improving your web design in the following ways:
1. Streamline your code
Technological advancements have seen web coding become less sophisticated with time. Today, you only need a few lines of code to make significant changes to your site. All you need is to keep up with what’s new in the world of web design so that your code remains as lean as possible for fast load speeds.
2. Compress your images
Avoid using large and poorly optimized images as they can take up quite a considerable chunk of your bandwidth and slow down your site. While at it, do not compromise image quality especially now that there are a handful of tools to help you compress your images with minimal loss of quality. What’s more, you can save images in formats that have minimal effect on quality like bmp and gif. The Digital Merchant has reviewed a couple of helpful tools that you can use to optimize your images.
3. Use a fast web host
Never underestimate the influence of a hosting server on your site speed and business success. If your current hosting plan no longer accommodates your business demands, it’s time to move up. Talk to your provider for an affordable solution that will improve your site performance.
C. Link structure
Google and all other search engines use web crawlers to gather data which they then use to inform their search results. These crawlers automatically click through links and index pages based on what they find there. Primarithatly, link building is based on this concept.
To be on the good books of both the search engines and users, your website needs to have a logical link structure that’s free of redundancy and broken links. Not only is this important for user navigation but it’s also critical for web spiders to access and index pages accordingly.
An ideal link structure observes some of the following guidelines:
- Menu links - These types of links are usually standard, running across all pages of a website. Some of the most popular menus include Home, About, Services, and Contact among others.
- Footer links - Footers offer an ideal location to add links to key pages of your website and make them appear more important in the eyes of search engines. They can also serve as the sitemap for users looking to browse through your site.
- Body/contextual links - Just as the name suggests, these links are placed inside the page copy. They can point to either internal or external pages and are considered by Google to be the most powerful.
- Sidebar links - These links are placed on either side of a page and are mostly used to lead visitors to other pages including recent/most commented posts and category pages.
Conclusion
The design of your website can affect its ability to rank for your targeted keywords on search results. This explains the reason it is vital to align both your SEO and web design efforts despite the two running as entirely distinct disciplines. The ultimate goal is to please the user and search engines, both of whom are the main drivers of your business success.
5 comments
Thanks for this helpful tips..It looks simple and informative. Now it's necessary to make online presence for every business.So we should make SEO friendly websites.