8 Basic Rules for Designing a Website for Search Engine Optimization
Web Design effects SEO
The website pops open, flashy colors everywhere, moving menus, nice catchy phrases; you are exhilarated about the result. Aren’t you forgetting something? Search Engine Optimization! Whenever you create or upgrade your web design, you must always take in consideration the SEO. There is no other way around.
Get SEO friendly web design
It doesn’t mean it has to be friendly only to the user but also to the search engines, this implies having a friendly
- Content
- Navigation
- HTML coding
- Design
- Internal Links
8 Basic SEO rules for web designers
You’d like to be your own web designer. Nobody shall blame you for your choice. It’s alright if you feel confident enough that you’ve got the skills to match the colors with the content. However, do not make one big mistake: SEO. Yes, that’s right! Even if you are a web designer your work should still take into consideration some basic SEO rules if you’d also like to be efficient. But remember, even if you consider yourself to be a pretty good beginner web designer, when it comes to the website of your business, in many cases it is recommended that you go for a web design and SEO company, like SEOYO.com and that will help you with a great website in a shorter while.
- Rule number one in web design: content
The first thing in web design would be to use readable content. It should be well structured so that you can get a higher rating in the search engines. You thought that web design is only about image but you were wrong. Make sure that you think both of looks and content and search engines. This will make you a successful web designer. Otherwise, if you are less determined on building the website by yourself, go to a web design company that will solve things faster. Since we are talking about contents, it is a rule of thumb that it must contain the proper keywords placed right so that search engines can direct the visitors to your website. However, do not abuse these as you will do much worse than good.
- The home page should be SEO friendly
You are thinking that a nice, flashy home page will attract the attention of the visitors and they will continue with the navigation around your website. Perhaps you are right. But where do the visitors mainly come from? The right answer is the search engines so you should become friends firstly with them and then with the visitors. Let me tell you one thing: search engines do not like very much home pages with flash objects as these cannot be crawled. If your own home page cannot be indexed, when home pages usually have high rankings, how will that help your website? Get rid of the flash objects!
- Not too many images
Again, you are interested in attracting the attention of the visitors with some flash navigation menus. Do you see the mistake? You thought of flash again. These kinds of menus are followed with difficulty by spiders. Moreover, do not think that lots of images will make your website look better. Let’s consider things rationally. Can search engines read text in images? No and this will imply that this content again will not appear in search engines. Now that basically we’ve taken out all the catchy stuff – flash and images, let’s see what you can actually do to have a web design that is also SEO friendly.
- Navigate on quiet waters
Once somebody gets on the website, he should be able to move from one page to another very fast and it should be very clear where a certain link or picture might take him. The search engines need a map of the website which can be easily crawled indexed and displayed in the search engine results pages. Forget about that very new technology. It can amaze you with dynamic effects but will not get you into Google. Stay with HTML or Flash. They do look cool also.
- Everybody loves it fast
How do you design menus? Use CSS background images instead of text. This will allow spiders to follow them. Since we are in the CSS department, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if you would place the JavaScript and CSS codes externally as doing this internally will slow down the crawling process. Your URL-s should contain keywords, which is very helpful for your visitors. Last but not least, make sure that your website is fast enough. Nobody likes to wait until the page loads and neither do the search engines.
- Coding for search engines
That is something that any web design company could advise you on. Your code needs to be search engine friendly. This will ensure not only visitors but also a great ranking. There are word processors that can help you create HTML and then upload it to your website via ftp. Before taking this solution in consideration, just stop. The problem with this alternative is that the code is seen as lines by the search engines robots and not as relevant content. No matter how great your HTML might be, the search engines will never see it so all your work will be in vain.
- Please all the users, appeal to all devices
Even if technology has evolved in an extremely fast pace and now you get your internet on everything – laptop, mobile, tablet, it’s still amazing that not all the companies have adapted their websites. Have you ever thought of how the website appears to a user that accesses it from his mobile phone? Does it look as good as on a desktop? Having a responsive design is a must, not only to please and attract visitors from all devices but also to get a ranking. Search engines love websites that don’t have a high bounce rate from mobile users.
- You need internal links
Firstly, these will help your visitors to navigate through your website. Secondly, these internal links help all the pages and blog posts to be indexed by search engines and, in the same time, revive your older posts and bring them into the center of attention. It would be advisable that you create your own strategy in what concerns the internal linking.
All things considered, web design is certainly not only about flashy colors and a catchy design. All these must be made bearing in mind that the search engine robots will come for a visit and they will not be impressed by the visual aspect but by how friendly your website is to them. So, prepare them a hot cup of milk, some cookies and a SEO friendly web design.
