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Blogs · SEO · Website Redesign
4 Tips to Ensure Your Website Design is SEO Friendly
When it comes to creating a website, you just can’t rely solely on its design. A well-designed website does not ensure that your website will receive a high traffic. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes. SEO optimization can help improve your website visibility on the search engine. By making your website SEO friendly, you can improve your search engine ranking and drive more traffic to your website.
Most of the time, when people think of SEO, they think about certain keywords in the blog post, articles, or copy on their website. But, creating an SEO-friendly website design requires more than just keywords. There are a few tips that you can use to ensure your website design is SEO friendly.
No matter how good your website design is, but if the page loading takes a lot of time, then it’s not SEO friendly. The loading speed refers to the time from rendering to when the last item on your website page loads. Most people don’t want to wait for more than five seconds for a page to load. So, if your website is too slow, people will most likely leave your website.
There are several things that could be going on when your website loads slowly. It can be because your CMS is outdated, too many plug-ins, too many graphics or large graphics files, or poor server performance. So, do your due diligence and find out what causes your website load slowly. If it’s because your website includes HD images or video, you don’t need to take them down immediately. Instead, find the right balance so your website’s loading speed is still fast.
While search engines are able to look through at any types of content, the text has always been the best option when it comes to SEO optimization. That being said, make sure you include a text on every page of your website. Even a small amount of text such as a 200-word product description is better than none. If you post audios or videos, include a text-based description on the same page.
Also, don’t forget to pay attention to each page’s SEO title and meta description. Make sure those two elements are filled out with text that includes the main keyword phrases you’re going for. Last but definitely not the least, your URLs must be great, too. For every page of your website, the URL must look like this: yourdomain.com/your-page-title-with-keywords. This will help visitors know what content is going to be on the page when they see the link.
Even though search engines like Google are sophisticated, they’re actually limited discovering content through links. If the links to your content are broken, your content won’t likely be discovered, which will be impossible to get your website’s pages to rank.
From a design perspective, your goal is to create an intuitive website architecture that makes users want to engage. Fortunately, this goal is aligned with the one from the SEO perspective, which is to create an architecture that allows pages to be looked through and distributes internal links evenly. Prioritize your most important content high up in the architecture.
According to the Google Webmaster Guidelines, you need to make a website with a clear hierarchy and text links. Make sure every page is reachable from at least one static text link. For SEO optimization as well as the user experience purposes, you should not go more than three levels deep with your links.
Think of your website’s architecture and plan your link structure accordingly. This could be as simple as creating the main navigation bar linking to the main four pages on your website. Just don’t be the website that makes visitors go from several pages before getting to what they want. In addition to that, it’s better if you also create a simple text link in the footer of your website for the main page. This will help visitors to easily navigate your website.
Now you know what to do to ensure your website design is SEO friendly!
As you can see, SEO friendly website isn’t just about design and keywords. You also need to consider other factors in order to make your website design more SEO friendly, and a simple checklist like ‘10-Steps Checklist for your next Website Redesign‘ might come in handy as well. Good luck!
