The optimisation efforts you put forth on your website should all tie together in bettering the user experience. The different techniques vary, for both on-page and off-page SEO.
Your web design provides a presentable front that represents your brand to the world and what you rank for is as important as you ranking for anything in the first place.
Without proper consideration for your web design, a lot of your great works may go unrecognised. You may never get the ranking position you merit, simply because of unmatched website design.
With a primary goal of coming up with a search engine friendly web design, there are specific techniques that are vital. Find below strategies to help you get ahead with a search engine friendly web design.
Optimising Page Speed
The time with which your web pages take before they open matters to both search engines and users. Technically, you may have well-written quality posts, but if your page is slow, then your traffic will be low.
Google may not directly penalise your site for having a slow loading website. However, every second that people have to wait for your site to open is another second you stand to lose your traffic. Your target audience cannot stand to wait for a website that takes more than 3 seconds to open, or at most 5 seconds.
Notice that with time, you realise an increase in bounce rates that greatly affect your ranking position. Google will end up ranking your site lower than it deserves because the target audience is not satisfied with the results they get from your site.
Website Navigation
The design of your website has a lot to do with how well and swift people can move from one place to another. It may be basic knowledge to have a website that is friendly to use, but not all sites are easy to navigate. For one, a user should find the information they are interested in without a lot of hassle.
Several tabs like contact, homepage, products and services, blog, among others, should be strategically located to help people get to the pages they want to access, comfortably. While considering the web design of your site in line with navigability, also consider the sidebars and widgets you use.
Too many of them can become problematic on the issue of load time and page speed. Only the very relevant and necessary widgets and sidebars should be part of your web design.
Keyword Research
One of the most fundamental practices of SEO is keyword research. You may think that the keyword tool you use is only important to find prime keywords to reach out to your target audience, but, the keywords you choose are meaningful to search engines.
For the most part, you need to capitalise on your search engine to find several keywords that can help you reach to your niche audience. Search engines harbor all the information on their users’ searches. The better you become in strategising your keyword use in your content, the higher you rank for searches on different search engines.
Your goal should be to get the right audience for your content, one you can easily satisfy by meeting their needs. Over and above, the suggestions on Google suggest should also help you narrow down your searches based on context, intent, and competition.
Internal Linking
Hardly do people consider internal linking as a crucial part of website design. A search engine friendly web design is one that makes it easier for Google to find content to index. Although Google bots crawl every site there is online, you can speed up the process. Internal linking is a deliberate effort to provide information about more of your web pages for Google to index for ranking.
Building up your content with internal links from other resourceful and relevant web pages in your site makes your material more profound and useful to the target audience. In the end, more and more of your content gets ranked, and your visibility to your audience improves.
Forget About Pop-Ups
Interstitial pop-up ads are common to website owners seeking to make an extra dollar from their site. However, considering the effect it has on your rankings on search engines, it may not be worth the risk.
A lot of the pop-up ads are intrusive, more especially for mobile phone users who have a small screen space to work with. If you have to advertise, it must not compromise the design of your site. This means that you can consider ads that do not take up the whole screen when a user is on your site. If for anything, ensure you optimise for excellent user experience before chasing after making more money out of your platform.
De-Clutter Your Website
There is such a thing as having a very cluttered website. When there is too much information scattered all over your web pages, your platform looks scattered. This is a great fail for your user experience. You can have clutter in the form of too many naked links, too many images, and videos.
Each of those can work to boost your ranking, but when used correctly. Organise the design of your website, leaving sufficient free space to encourage navigation.
While at it, pick out complementary colors for your background and the font. A good contrast should not be strenuous for readers to read. Avoid flashy colors that also bring about some illusion of a very untidy site.
301 Redirection
A 301 redirect plan is essential when you are launching a new website. Technically, you may be able to transfer a lot of your content from one site to the other. If you are not careful to optimise your new website, it does not matter whether the design is better than the previous one.
A 301 redirect plan ensures that people will not receive any error messages when they click on any page on your platform. The redirect will send all your traffic to your new platform, usually the homepage of a landing page of choice.
Audit Your Website Frequently
A brief or in-depth analysis of your site will go a long way in keeping you on the right track for the search engine. Take time to check what is working and what is not, regarding your SEO efforts.
Your website along with your on-page optimisation techniques should give you’re a top rank position when done correctly.
Keep Up With Google Updates
All these tips can help you realise a very good-looking and responsive website. However, if you are not in tune with the Google algorithmic updates, your ranking may still suffer. Every after a while, Google launches a new update.
The problem is, they do not always announce their update. You must, therefore, remain vigilant in finding out what the changes are. Understand how RankBrain works, and how this artificial intelligence refines search results to match the needs of the audience. This way, you can fine-tune the design of your website to align with Google’s algorithms for every update they launch.
Pro Tip: for as long as you are optimising for the audience first, you will almost always be on the right side of Google updates. The reasons are that Google values the satisfaction of its users, hence the frequent updates.
Wrapping Up
The design of your website is a necessary factor to consider in SEO if at all any of your optimisation efforts are to pay off.
Invest your time and resources in structuring the best website that is simplistic, but can adequately allow you to practice SEO for better rankings.