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.