SEO Web Design: Key Areas of Design Optimization
Introduction
I always like to emphasize the
importance of writing a great article/copy that includes the natural placement of
keywords relevant
to your business and the search requirements of your visitors. In today’s post, I am going to tell you how the design of your website can affect your website's Search Engine
Optimization SEO.
It is important that you understand
that you can make your website invisible to search
engines or drop your search engine rankings if you get the design
process wrong. If you are searching for any design optimization solution for
your Dallas SEO web design, this
post might be helping you.
The Key Areas
Here are the key areas I would
focus on in the design stage or redesign if you already have a website:
1. Planning
On Text
You have to make sure that your
website contains plenty of text which is very important to the success of your
website. If you don’t have enough text
you won’t be able to include enough keywords or worse
appear to the search
engines that you are “Keyword stuffing” and seriously damage your
ranking. There is also the danger that you don’t include certain keywords that
prospects use to find the type of product or service you are offering – which
means you won’t rank at all for that search.
2. Content Position
Always put your most important
content at the top of the page. When you like surfing the net, choosing a
book or magazine I bet you can read the content quickly to see if what you are
looking at is of interest. Most people
adopt the same tactic and will quickly scan a page from top to bottom to check
relevance therefore make sure you put your most important content in the
initial few paragraphs and use a quality heading.
Break up your text using subheadings and bullet points too where relevant. The search engines will also
scan the content at the top of the page first and will use this to assess what
your page is about. Content lower down
the page may not even get noted. Learn more about the “SEO On-page
optimization factor can boost your search engine rankings (SERP)”.
3. Over Usage
of Media Files
Don’t overuse images, animation,
audio files, and videos. I’m not saying don’t use them; just limit their use to
complement quality content. Look at “How to write high-quality unique content”. The
search bots can’t read this type of media and will ignore it. However, you can use a descriptive ALT Tag to
help a search bot understand the relevance of the image or video. Don’t stuff your Alt Tag description with
keywords; simply describe the image as you see it. An ALT tag is also useful to those who can’t
see images and the blind will often have software that reads a page out loud so
keeping the description natural will make sense to them.
Whilst images and videos don’t help
with SEO if you make them shareable you could strike and drive significant
quality traffic to your site from social media shares such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn and etc.
4. Maximize
Your SEO Efforts
Always try to maximize your SEO
efforts on every page of the website. Not every visitor to your website is
going to land on your home page nor would you want them to, it is far better
for them to land on a page that addresses their search query quickly without
the need for them to search within your site.
So with this in mind have a plan
for what you want to achieve on each page, what type of visitor you want to
attract, envisage their information needs and decide what action you want to
encourage them to take when they land on it. If you do this well you should
significantly increase the variety of keywords and phrases that your site ranks
for, improve the probability of matching the search requirements of your
visitors and therefore convert more visits into sales.
5. Organize
Your Website Effectively
Keep in mind to organize your
website effectively and include your keywords in your file and folder
names. Name your site pages with your
keywords too. Make sure the structure of your website is not complex and avoid
having a deep hierarchy of folders and directory levels. Keep your hierarchy as flat as can be as it
makes your site much easier to navigate.
Read more about “The Correct
Page Structure in Terms of SEO.”
6. Avoid Duplicate
Contents
The virtual world such as the internet
is very robust. But the problem is if you use any duplicate content on your
site by copying other’s websites; Google BOT can trace
them and that’s why you need to avoid using duplicate content on your site as
it can be seen as spam by the search engines.
If you are selling multiple product
variations introduce a dynamic drill-down navigation tool like what Amazon uses to help customers filter product options to
match their requirements. An example can
be seen in the left-hand content sidebar in the screenshot below.
7. Test Before
Deploy
Before you go live and during the
lifetime of your website continually test it.
There are various tools that you can use to do this. I often use Google’s webmaster tools to make
sure my site is being crawled and has no crawl errors or SEO issues.
Believe me, it’s not so hard to test
your website. If you are using WordPress for your website, you will find plenty
of useful plugins to do this. Familiarize yourself with this tool, they aren’t
difficult to use and can be useful to highlight areas for improvement.
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