Search Engine Optimization or SEO has a very big impact on the success of a website. SEO is responsible for making websites highly searchable to users. This searchability, in turn, creates traffic to a website and ultimately business.
Here are five tips to keep in mind when creating a kick-ass web design with SEO in consideration.
Strategize keyword placement
Keywords are the lifeblood of SEO. But just placing them all over the place without careful planning can have a detrimental effect. Today’s search engine ranking algorithms put more value in the user experience and reward sites accordingly.
Sites that are deemed rich in content that is user relevant are given higher search engine rankings as opposed to low-quality content sites. In fact, overuse of keywords can even lead to penalizations. Place keywords strategically in titles, meta tags, photo and video titles, headers and footers, and product descriptions, for example.
Keywords should offer value and not appear haphazardly placed. Plan keyword placement ahead of time so that it doesn’t appear out of place, and it feels organic to the site. This will make more sense to the user and to site rankings as well.
Find out which keywords are currently trending and which ones are usable for your site objectives.
Create site-maps that are crawl-friendly
Improve SEO using a strategic site map that will promote web-crawling. Prompt web-crawling of all site pages and establish priority pages for crawling by using site maps to deliver URL lists. Promoting web-crawling pays long-term dividends in terms of search engine ranking.
Optimize site loading speed
Slow loading speeds cause users to just pack up and leave despite the elaborate web design you made, and this puts a negative outcome on SEO. Set up your sites in such a way that it utilizes tools and processes that greatly improve loading speeds.
To do this, you need to lessen factors affecting loading speeds on the server side like unnecessary plug-ins. Avoid redirects if possible, and make use of compression. Remove unnecessary characters from your code to streamline and make it more efficient. These are major factors that affect a site’s loading speed.
Create a social site presence
Search engine ranking puts a premium on website users’ experience. This engagement is recognized by web crawlers and is counted towards a higher search engine ranking. Design your sites to have social sharing buttons, stunning visuals, and anything else that will make social sharing easy. Sharing works wonders in boosting SEO by increasing overall user engagement and also driving subsequent traffic back to the site.
Choose your links properly
Choosing your links carefully goes a long way in positive SEO results. Utilizing a lot of broken links, outbound links, and questionable links put its toll on SEO outcomes.
Provide content-rich links that users can actually use to further improve on user experience and being careful not to overdo it. Bad links and overuse of unnecessary links on your web design only result in search engine penalties and in worst-case scenario negative impression on user experience.
