Day 24: Design of your website
If your business runs online, design your website keeping SEO in mind and do not leave it to add it later. Your website may be designed in a very fancy manner, but if it lacks the tricks for SEO, you may lag behind in your field. If the search engine is not able to read your website quickly and effectively, you might not get the desired ranking in search results. Adapting SEO tricks on your website does not only mean the content and links. It also includes technology decisions, site architecture, site navigation etc.
Let us talk about some tips to create an SEO friendly website design:
1. Heading Tags– These are the H1, H2 and H3 tags of your website. Headings tell the user what content the page may have. The search engines use these heading tags to get an idea of is there in the page. These tags have different importance levels with the H1 tag having the most. The H1 tag tells what is the web page all about. Whereas the H2, H3 tag what is there in the content.
2. Web Design and User Experience– You should focus on providing the best user experience to the users who visit your website so that they might want to return back to you again in future.
3. Images– Add proper and relevant images on your website and do not forget to add Alt tags to all the images. You can also add infographics on your site.
4. Perform A/B Testing– Once your site is ready, make someone test your website as a user. The person should not be someone from the development team so that the test is held unbiased.
5. Navigation options– Include proper navigation options on your website so that the user can easily know what other pages are there on your website that he might want to see. A site without proper navigation may not let web crawlers read your site properly.
6. Fonts: Choose proper fonts for your content based on what your website does. Fonts can be different for headlines and the paragraphs so that the user can easily distinguished. Do not use very fancy ones that the user is not even able to understand.
7. Website Theme- For a good user interface, chose a limited set of colors for your UI, backgrounds, and texts. Do not go very overboard and make your site a rainbow. Use subtle yet attractive colors.
8. Include a Call-To-Action Button- Add a call-to-action button on your website that directs your users on the main purpose of your website. It can be your products page, offers page or a simple registration page.
9. Justify your page content- No user will like a website that has text running just anywhere and everywhere. use proper alignment and justification for your pages so that your page looks clean and readable.
10. Mobile-friendliness-
Focus on the user experience of mobile users as well. Majority of people use mobile phones to search on the web. So optimize your pages for the mobile version of your site as well.
Do not forget to fix the broken links and duplicate content on your website. Keep updating the content on your website to keep your website fresh. Sites with fresh content are better crawled by web crawlers. Remove the old and low-quality pages if not of any need. Do not add unnecessary pop-ups in your website that may decrease the user experience.
Importance of a good web design:
- A proper web designing of your website can enhance your brand presence. If you use any form of logo or tagline in your print advertisements. make sure you add them to your website as well so that users can easily relate with you.
- Writing your blog and page contents while including proper SEO elements can make your page rank better on search result pages.
- Your website is responsive when it runs similarly on all platforms like a laptop, mobile phones, tablets, and desktops. Having a good and responsive website design can help you in reducing the bounce rate of your website. Bounce rate is when the user goes back from your website. A user clicks on your link from the search result page but that hits the back button when he doesn’t find some god or relevant content. This show that your page lacks the user engaging features.
- Users will spend on your website if your site is easy to use and serves its purpose well. The more time user spends on your site, the better. It tells that the user is finding your website relevant and he wants to see more of your pages.
In our next article, we will be discussing the importance of email marketing for the promotion of your website.
