Seo Friendly Web Design Services: What You Need To Know

Do you want your business to rank on the first page of the search engines? Then you need to learn about Search Engine optimization(SEO) and web designing, as they are crucial to your online success. In order to nail your online presence, you must create a website that has a responsive and functional design and follows the best SEO practices. When you do build such a site, you make it possible for your business to rank higher in the search results, which in turn translates to more traffic, leads and sales. 

Let’s first talk about how SEO services and web design are related. Talking about SEO and web design, the purpose of both is to provide a user-friendly experience to website visitors. So while web designers focus more on the aesthetic and functional components of the website, SEO works on improving the search engine rankings for the website and bringing it in front of the right audience. However, the end goal is the same which is to give users what they want and help your business build an exemplary online presence. 

Many website owners think that they just need an aesthetically pleasing website in order to rank in search engines and get in front of their target audience. This is not true, just a great design cannot outweigh poor SEO efforts. 

Simply put, a beautiful-looking site is of no use if you’re not doing SEO, as it will not get seen. Similarly, even if you rank highest on search engines but your design is poor, visitors will leave which will eventually harm your ranking. 

Thus, SEO and web design have to go hand in hand for your website’s success. 

Here are a few factors you must consider while working on your website:

1. Responsive website: A responsive design is a must for a website to rank in search engines. A responsive website is more user-friendly as it renders its layout in accordance with the device on which it is accessed, be it a PC, Laptop, iPhone, smartphone, iPad.

It is important for local businesses to rank higher in mobile searches. Why? First of all, 50% of users who conduct local searches on mobile devices will visit stores within a day after their search. It’s more impressive that 78 percent of mobile searches for local businesses leads to offline purchase.

2. Optimized Text and images: It is important to optimize your test and images for search engines. There are a few things you must keep in mind when optimizing images for your websites. 

• Your images should have a logical and descriptive file name. 
• Although large-sized images are high quality and more visually appealing, your designer must keep the file size as small as possible. Large files take more time to load and hence will slow down your website. 
• Do not forget to add alt text to your images. Alt tags are descriptive text that help search engines understand what the image depicts. 

3. Mobile friendliness: An increasing number of Internet users are now using their mobile devices to surf the Internet. Hence, your site needs to be mobile-friendly so that is it easily accessible from all devices. This will not only provide a comfortable and better user experience but might also influence search engine rankings since now mobile-friendliness is an important ranking factor in Google. 

4. Easy navigation: Navigation is one of the most important factors to ensure a great user experience, and thus, you should keep it simple. The probability of converting into a sale is higher when your site visitors are able to easily find what they are looking for. Easy-to-use navigation also lowers the risk of your visitors getting confused and leaving your site, which can lower your bounce rate and improve your rankings.

5. URL Structure: Every page must have a descriptive URL that defines the content of the page. Words should be separated with hyperbolas (NOT underscores) and you should include some relevant keywords. URLs with descriptive keywords (instead of randomly generated numbers or letters) will assist search engines to comprehend your site’s pages. They can also make it easier for visitors to remember your website.

6. Crawling and accessibility: The first step is to ensure that the search engines can crawl your website and comprehend the things you are doing.

Indexation

To comprehend your website users must be able to read the contents of your page. It means that the primary information on your website must be written in text in the background. In this constantly evolving world, your primary content must be written text-based. Images as well as videos, PDFs, and other content are also essential and could be the source of the traffic to search engines. These must be searchable and indexable.

Link structure

To index your content outside of the homepage, you must have internal hyperlinks that the search engine can crawl. Your main navigation is through search engine directives, as well as tools such as XML sitemaps can aid the search engine in crawling your website and finding new pages. Tools such as Screaming Frog will help ensure that your website can quickly be crawled by the search engine.

7. Cross Browser Compatibility: Cross-browser compatibility means that the website or web application is capable of functioning across different browsers. To achieve that, the web developer can help you by not over-complicating the code and keeping it simple. A website that is capable of functioning across different browsers is definitely more user-friendly and has a higher chance of ranking in the search engine result pages. 

When developing a website, it is a good idea to test your site in one browser at a given time such as Firefox. Firefox is extremely flexible in every aspect. When you are satisfied with the results of testing the one browser, you can test your website in additional browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Opera, etc.

To Conclude

The above-mentioned points explain how SEO-friendliness should be at the core of Web design services. While SEO works on improving search engine rankings, web designing is important to make sure the website is responsive, functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. SEO and web designing must work together from the beginning for the success of any website.