Just having an optimized website isn’t enough if you want to compete in the new media landscape successfully. You should consider a number of factors while designing your site. These factors include modern day design, usability, conversion, content and social media as discussed below.
Design
Finding the right balance between a web design that looks simple yet modern, engaging and informative, and maintainable for SEO performance, is the bedrock of success for businesses. The biggest challenge designers face these days is juggling graphical representation, CSS and HTML elements. However, a good designer knows how to design a website keeping in mind the SEO factors as well as the new responsive design trends. Here are some tips for you:
- When designing a site, ensure it reflects what your potential users want
- Make your site easily navigable
- Be innovative and create a flat design
- Make sure design and content complement one another
- Use text and images along with relevant content
Usability
What happens when your users hit your site? If they find the site useful, they will use it for their own advantage and that’s what your motto should be. You would definitely not want your user to visit your competitor site once hitting your URL. To make sure your users stay on the site, it’s essential to blend your SEO strategy and website design with usability. Here’s how you can do it:
- Use eye-tracking studies and user-experience and incorporate the findings in your interface.
- Make sure to include a concise and clear headline to grab reader’s attention.
- Your site’s response time and speed should be quick. A delay for even two seconds may lose you a user and thereby chance of a sale.
- Focus on readability color, typography, text, backgrounds and images. Ensure the fonts and colors you use are easy on the eyes and there are subheadings to outline your content logically.
- Make sure your page looks good and reads well.
SEO
This is where the technical and marketing departments must align. Artistic influence should be balanced with search engine friendly structure. Below are some SEO tips for you:
- Create XML and HTML site maps to make sure search engines index your site correctly during crawling
- Create friendly URLs and URL structure so that search engines know what your web page is all about
- Avoid Flash and splash menus
- Use anchor text links that are relevant
- Write page titles, which are descriptive and relevant
- To rank your images in the search engines, use image ALT attributes and give an appropriate image description
- Do not use too many H1 tags. They look good to designers but not to search engines
- Make sure to optimize your website for tablet and mobile search
Content
Content is the king. If a reader doesn’t find informative and relevant content on your page, he/she will look for other sites that can satisfy his/her needs. You would certainly not want to lose your customer this way. Right? Here are some content tips for you:
- Make sure your website content is relevant, concise and plagiarism free
- Use white space to put emphasis to and break various aspects of the content
- Arrange your contentâtime, date, location, target audience, and topic
Integration
Social media plays a huge role in a site’s successful performance. This is more than just adding buttons to a site. It’s essential to integrate and link campaigns from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ so that people stay connected more on your site. Make sure you also provide ‘Share’ options on your site. This will boost your site traffic and give you organic links.
However, always remember one thing – you are designing a website for people and not for search engines. So, the SEO practices you implement on the site’s design must be invisible.
Koustuv Roy is an expert writer, speaker and blogger. He is also an expert in the field of web design and development and has worked on several premier web design assignments from across different business verticals. Here he offers an insider’s guide on the prime advantages of opting for dating website design.
12 Comments
Leave a Reply
Cancel reply
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Pramod
August 22, 2013 at 11:58 am
I agree with all the points and the way you’ve elaborated them . For me design matters more than anything else,a good website design can do wonders to a website .Thanks for sharing the information .
-Pramod
myles
August 22, 2013 at 1:26 pm
Website design plays a vital role in the development and even int he conversions. Nowaday also site speed plays an important role in the SEO efforts of a website.
Koustuv Roy
August 23, 2013 at 9:15 am
Myles you’re right. Site speed, indeed, play a crucial role.
Thanks for your comment.
FrankCern
August 23, 2013 at 4:17 pm
Design is indeed crucial these days. No one wants to spend time browsing a poorly designed website.
Alon Alexander
August 23, 2013 at 8:18 pm
Designing part is the very important factor to look and feel any websites. This is real fact without HTML and CSS we can\’t develop the websites. Web Site design plays the important role to providing the informative knowledge.
raj
August 24, 2013 at 5:33 am
Nice write up Roy. you haven’t left anything else to do with your website design. Website design always make first impression in your readers mind, but we should never compromise with our content for the sake of design. There should be parallel weightage given to both of them. Design must be Good but content should be clearly shown where readers want them to see. Thanks for the great article mate.
Koustuv Roy
August 26, 2013 at 6:46 am
Raj, bulls eye mate! Content is still the king. If you don’t provide a succinct write up in your web page, visitors won’t be staying in there much longer. You can say, that both content and design are complimentary to each other. Thanks for your feedback. Stay connected!
William Miller
August 28, 2013 at 9:59 am
The social media was always hardest for me! What content to use to get people interested? How to promote products? How to make special offers or sweepstakes? These questions I keep asking myself day after day.
Koustuv Roy
August 29, 2013 at 7:12 am
William you’re right. social media is altogether a different ball game. you need professional guidance and expertise to promote the right message to your target audience. I would suggest you opt for a social media marketing strategist to seek advice and service. I can help you in this regard. There’s a famous agency I know that delivers the exact service you need. Drop a mail to for a free quote. All the best buddy!
Koustuv Roy
August 29, 2013 at 7:18 am
William you’re right. social media is altogether a different ball game. you need professional guidance and expertise to promote the right message to your target audience. I would suggest you opt for a social media marketing strategist to seek advice and service. I can help you in this regard. There’s a famous agency I know that delivers the exact service you need. Drop a mail to sales(at)itsinindia(dot)com for a free quote. All the best buddy!
Vishal
August 28, 2013 at 3:20 pm
nice post.. the speed is the important factor when we developed the new website nowadays.. other also important..great job
Mark Ford
August 31, 2013 at 9:22 am
Some important tips here. I’ve also read recently that load speed is also a factor Google considers when ranking a site.