Are you concerned that your web design might be holding your SEO efforts back? Are you looking to design a new website, but not sure how to do it with SEO in mind?
You’re in luck. We’ve been doing SEO for many different types of businesses over the years, and one of the things we do well is creating websites and website designs that are built specifically to optimize a business’s ranking on Google and other search engines.
How to Make Your Web Design SEO Friendly
Keep in mind that Google cares only about one thing: whether or not their search engine is giving people what they were looking for. However, Google’s robots need to be able to adequately read and assess a website in order to figure out what keywords it should rank for.
So what do you need to do to have a SEO friendly website?
Make Your Site FAST!
Site speed matters much more greatly now than ever. In a world where many people have lightning fast data connections on their mobile phones, if your site doesn’t load quick enough they’re more than willing to go to another site that does. So here’s some quick tips on site speed.
Don’t overload the page with visuals:
Too many visuals not only makes for a bad user experience but it also makes for a slow website. Use visuals when they make sense and when they help the user read or understand what they’re reading.
Use JavaScript Sparingly:
Javascript is an extremely useful tool for web design but it’s not all that useful for SEO. What’s worse is that too much Javascript code running in the background, relying on queries from the client and server, can really bog down a site.
Be Careful with Flash Elements:
Adobe Flash is quickly becoming deprecated by many Web browsers. As a result, websites that used to rely on Flash are no longer able to work on many people’s computers. Not only that, but Flash elements have little inherent SEO value to them unlike HTML5 videos, images, and maps.
Mobile first is the way:
Yes: mobile responsive design should be focused entirely on optimizing sites specifically for mobile. You can read our blog to know if your website is mobile-friendly. Desktop elements to make the site look good are secondary. Make sure your site runs smoothly, quickly, and easily on mobile!
Make Your Site Easy For Google To Read
Google needs to be able to understand what’s on the site in order for it to figure out what keywords your site should appear for. So how do you do that?
HTML5 is full of SEO helpers:
Article tags, section tags, nav tags, and a variety of different link and media parameters can help your page or your on-page media (images, videos, PDFs) rank on the search engines. Go to https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ for the full documentation.
Heading tags help SEO:
Heading tags have been used since the beginning, and they’re still just as important. Headings not only help break up your content logically, they also help Google identify the main ideas of your content.
Use SEO for Images Too:
It’s very simple: WordPress plugins can help you optimize any image on your site. For those who don’t use WordPress, alt tags and image links are a great tool.
