The biggest challenge of every web design company is to design a website that can impress the SEO gods of search engines. After all, the ultimate goal is to show up right up front when the audience keys in the search terms.
But what does it entail to create an SEO-friendly website? Do you need to hire website redesign services to ensure your website is aligned with the SEO design requirements? The short answer is yes — a few changes to your website can give you the desired results.
Wondering where to begin? Here’s what top web design companies have to say:
1. Improve the loading speed of your webpage
Your audience no longer has the patience to wait for the website to load fully. With shrinking attention spans, they will likely hit the exit button if your website doesn’t appear within a few seconds, impacting your SEO ranking.
There are several tools at your disposal that can help you to enhance the speed of your website in a jiffy. Apart from those, here are some strategies that you can implement to ensure that your website loads at top speed:
- Get rid of all plugins you are not using. These make the website sluggish and adversely impact the loading times
- Have a minimum number of CSS and JavaScript files
- Have minimum redirects. Too many redirects mean that the HTTP request gets prolonged, increasing the response process.
- Allow caching of your web pages. This stores the copies of your page and reduces the work of a server as it no longer has to generate the same page multiple times to deliver to the visitor’s browser.
- Permit asynchronous loading that allows multiple files to load at the same time. While doing so, also defer the loading time of CSS and JavaScript as they tend to be more time-consuming.
2. Have a proper structure for your content
Indexing your website is important for making it more easily visible on search engine ranking results. One of the most preferred ways of achieving that is by properly structuring the content appearing on your website. When you have a good structure, you make it easier for search engines to crawl and locate web pages. Unless they are able to do that, they will be unable to index the pages, leading to poor SEO performance.
Make sure that all related content is grouped together. Keep the content simple and easy to understand and arrange them in a logical hierarchy. It is also advisable to use proper tags for classifying each content. For instance, every web page should have the following:
- Header
- The title tag
- Subheadings to distinguish various sections
- Information about the author and the social media handles
- Footer
You can also highlight your most important pages to focus the search engines directly on that. Don’t forget to plan the site structure cleverly. The objective should be to identify pillar pages for every topic cluster your website is targeting and then group relevant pages under that. All the pages that explore a topic in-depth should link back to the main content pillar page. This way, all the content on your website can be seamlessly connected and easily indexed by search engines.
3. Increase internal linking
You can think of internal linking as the creation of a map that makes the job of search engine crawlers easier. They help search engines understand your website better and help it rank higher. The more internal links you provide, the easier you make it to identify which pages o your website are more important. Over time, this can help boost the SEO of your website.
While too many internal links on your website can be distracting for the audience, Google has previously noted that it has the capability of crawling through 100 links on every page. So targeting 100 or fewer links than that can be beneficial for SEO.
4. Follow a clean URL structure
URLs don’t usually feature right on top of the to-do lists of website designers. But in reality, the URL structure can have a great impact on how high the website ranks. That’s why following the right URL structure is critical — after all, it is the address to your website on the internet. A disorganised URL is a surefire way to drive away search engines from paying much attention to your website.
Whenever you are plugging in URLs, make sure to keep them as short as possible. Always spread the target keywords throughout the URL but ensure that you don’t overstuff them. Make use of easy-to-read and understand words in the URL. These perform much better than adding a long string of numbers. Follow a logical hierarchy for URLs as it positively impacts the user experience. Better the UX, the higher the chances of your website being more SEO friendly.
5. Pay attention to mobile-friendliness
In 2023, you cannot afford to design a website that is not compatible with mobile browsers. Most of the audience prefers browsing on their mobile phones, and a sub-optimal experience can hurt your SEO badly.
Mobile friendliness of your website is important to make it easier for search engines to skim through the page. The easier it is for them, the higher your chances of making it to the top of the search engine ranking results. The mobile website should be quick to load, aesthetically appealing, easy to navigate, and deliver an overall enjoyable experience to the users.
6. Have an attractive meta description
Meta descriptions help search engines understand what the content on your website is all about. It appears right below the URL of a web page. If you don’t add the meta description, the search engine may pull random bits of text from the content.
The meta description can be a great way to hack your SEO efforts. If you add the right keyword and ensure that it is of the appropriate length, chances are that the search engine will notice it and push your page up. It also helps users to pick the right page from the search results, boosting the traffic received by your website.
7. Create a responsive website
When you adopt a responsive website design, you do away with the unnecessary hassle of maintaining different versions of the same website that are compatible with the web browser and mobile browser. It saves the audience from unnecessary scrolling or zooming in to find the information they need. In turn, this helps your SEO efforts as the search engine recognizes your website to be the one that serves useful information to the audience.
Moreover, according to Google, a responsively designed mobile website also has a better chance of ranking as a website made specifically for mobile. Since for mobile searches, Google tends to rank those websites that are specifically optimised for it, you are better off opting for a responsive web design.
8. Use optimised images
Images on your website play a key role in boosting your SEO game. Some audiences may want to find websites through the Google image search tab — the more attractive your images are, the better the chances of the audience checking out the website, ultimately leading to a higher SERP.
It is not enough to simply bombard your website with images. Apart from choosing the right visual assets that complement the text, you must also ensure that they are compressed appropriately so that they don’t slow down the website speed. Also, be careful about the format you choose for uploading the images. Formats such as JPEG, PNG, and WebP can help compress the size and speed up your website’s loading. Lastly, always add ALT text to make your content accessible to those browsing the website with the help of a screen reader.
9. Use targeted keywords throughout the website
Adding relevant keywords throughout the content of your website is critical for attracting the right audience and giving a boost to your SEO efforts. Comprehensive keyword research can help you determine the most important ones to be featured in your content strategy.
You should aim to use them smartly through a variety of ways such as infographics, ebooks, videos, and blogs to increase the SEO friendliness of your website. The more organically you infuse the right keywords, the better your chances of ranking high up on search engine results.
10. Enhance the readability of your content
Ultimately, the user experience of your website boils down to readability.
The more readable your website is, the easier it is for the audience to stay engaged. This is a major contributing factor when it comes to enhancing the SEO of your website. For instance, ensure no pop-up ads are in the middle of the browsing experience. This can disengage the audience completely and also open you up to facing penalties by Google.
Similarly, make sure to add ample white spaces on your website instead of completely cluttering it with information and images. It can go a long way in ensuring that your website is easy to comprehend. This can cause an uptick in traffic and impact the SEO positively.
Conclusion
In the age of fierce competition, it is imperative for businesses to choose a web design that is aligned with best SEO practices. Only can they dream of surviving and emerging on top of the search engine pages.
