Your web design should be SEO friendly. This is the first criteria that you should keep in mind when developing a website. You can try out many things to make your website search friendly. But here are the top five things that you should begin with in your website design.
5 Must Use SEO Friendly Web Design Tips Your Site Cannot Do Without
#1 – Make it Responsive
The number of website visits that you would get now-a-days are from mobile devices. Out of these, 50% of the search made by the consumers lead to a store visit within the next few days. 78% of the mobile searches made result in offline purchases.
A responsive web design makes it easy to access a website from any device be it the smartphone, tablet or a laptop. From the developer’s side, you do not need to create multiple pages to adjust into different screen sizes. All that you have to do is develop a responsive template that will reshape itself judging your device screen size. As far as the platform is concerned, you can decide to run the website using static HTML template files or a content management system that uses a responsive theme. WordPress for example, is a popular content management system that can help you create a static website, e-commerce store, blog, forum or anything that you want to run online.
#2 – Include Important Texts
Text has always been the best option that the search engine bots crawl. That is why, it is fair enough to reason out why content marketing is an important marketing tool. Your website should come with some text on each page. Even a short description of not more than 150 words is better than a blank page. If you have uploaded a video or an image in a particular web page, make sure to include a text based transcription below.
The title and the meta description is also important to consider. Your title should have a 50 – 60 character limit and your meta description should be of 150 – 160 character limit. Do not forget to optimize it with important keywords. One of the common mistakes that businesses make is, including important information inside pictures. Search bots fail to crawl texts that are contained within images. If you want to add a phone number or a contact address, then place them somewhere else like below the image. This will make it easier for the search bots as well as for people who are interested to contact you. Do not also forget to insert relevant keywords in your site URLs. This will boost up your page keyword optimization and help people identify what is inside your page.
#3 – Optimize Your Images
Optimize your images with texts that will increase their search visibility. Optimized images get a chance to appear more often on search engines. Some of the ways by which you can optimize your images are –
- Renaming the image filename by including specific keywords
- Using HTML attributes to your images
- Creating a caption to define your images
#4 – Having a Text-Based Navigation Structure
Your website link navigation structure should be based on the organization of your website. For example, you can link your pages to one important webpage. However, do not forget about your user experience. When designing your website’s navigation structure, make sure not to take your links three level deep. Your navigation structure should be important for viewers to understand and this also applies to your search crawlers.
#5 – Remember to Redirect
When redirecting to a new web version, do not forget about your old web pages. Deleting the old pages, will cause you more trouble since when visitors enter your new page, they will receive a 404 error instead. There are more problems because, search engines will remove the page from the search results, thinking that the page no longer exists. You will lose all the organic traffic that you have been receiving till now.
Use 301 redirects to inform the search bots about transfer from the old web version to the new one. This will help you to restore the traffic as well as the SEO value. Besides, any existing links from the old page to the new one will be counted. This will help you to maintain the domain authority that you have managed to build using SEO efforts. There is a plugin named Redirection that you can utilize here. You can also contact a web development company that can help you create a new .htaccess file on your website server. This is how the format will look like –
redirect 301 /your-page /your-new-page
Update your website permalinks with optimized keywords that you would be needing in order to redirect the old pages to the new version. You can even use a customized 404 page to help you back up any links in case you have forgotten to redirect to the new web page. This will direct a visitor to the alternative pages of your website instead. You can include links to your website’s main service page, home page, about page or even to the contact page.
Conclusion
Designing an SEO friendly website is not just about making yourself visible on the search engine. It is also about designing a template that brings in the right functionality that makes the user experience visitor friendly. So the next time you design your website, ensure that it’s both search engine as well as visitor friendly.
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