Web Design And SEO: What Is The Connection?
When it comes to website design, some tend to consider only how the website looks and forget about other aspects like SEO. While website design is an essential factor, you also have to think of how your website would look on various devices and how well-optimized it is. This is why you should choose web designers who have knowledge and expertise about the significance of SEO and good website design. As an alternative, you can also consider hiring graphic design companies that also offer web design services. Designeroptics is one of the companies that offer great services.
Remember, there’s a connection between website design and SEO. No matter how well-designed your website is, without proper SEO structure, it won’t have great results as you still might get a low amount of traffic. Moreover, there are limitations to what you may do for a website from an SEO point-of-view if your website isn’t built properly from the ground up. Whatever improvement you’re doing on your website with the help of a web design company or on your own, it’s always important to keep both website design and SEO in mind
An Overview Of SEO
Search engine optimization or SEO involves the process of improving your website to increase its visibility level for relevant searches. The better the visibility of your web pages, the better they’ll rank in search results, which can help get your name out there and attract your target audience to your business.
Generally, there are two branches of SEO:
- On-page SEO is when the website owners ensure pages, content, posts, links, and media are loaded fast, clearly labeled, and formed well.
- On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to reviews and backlinks. It may also involve social media.
An Overview Of Website Design
Website design refers to the site’s design that’s displayed online. Usually, it refers to the user experience aspect of website development.
Back then, website design used to focus on having elements for desktop browsers. However, due to the popularity of mobile devices, more and more website designers are focusing on creating a responsive website design for both desktop and mobile browsers. Website designers also pay attention to coding and include keywords to give your SEO a boost, which can help you gain traffic.
Website Design And SEO – How Are They Connected?
Search engines like Google aspire to offer the best possible experience and relevant search results to their users. If Google doesn’t provide this kind of information, they’ll fail in doing their responsibilities. This is why Google rewards websites that are up-to-date and well-organized by giving websites higher rankings on SERPs or search engine result pages.
It only happens when the websites are easy to navigate on every device, have good content, and include comprehensive posts or pages. The better website content you have, the better the pages rank on Google for the target key terms. Strong pages also do better once your site is optimized.
When your page ranks better, it’ll get more visibility, which drives more traffic to your website. However, websites with good content and keywords won’t be successful if they have slow website speed and difficult navigation. Therefore, focus not just on the visual elements of your website design, but also on other crucial elements like loading time.
Ways To Make Your Website Design And SEO Work Together
Whatever improvement you’re making on your website, it’s always important to keep both website design and SEO in mind. If you want your website to be well-designed and optimized at the same time, below are some of the tips to consider:
- Use Image Overlays
An effective and best way to include SEO text without compromising your website design is through the use of overlay images. Once viewed, the image appears as intended, but when users roll over the image, it reveals the key SEO content. This can be a good idea for including important product descriptions or content since search engines usually ignore the image and focus on the overlaid text.
- Keep Small Images Only
Big images may have an impact on your website speed, which can be the key to boosting your website’s SEO performance. So, optimize your images and make sure to use only the small ones to keep your website’s loading time at an optimum speed.
In terms of icons, it’s best to consider using SVGs as they have small file sizes compared to JPGs and PNGs, with the bonus of looking crisp on devices with retina screens.
- Try To Incorporate Animation
An interactive element like animation offers users an engaging experience, which may help increase conversion rates and dwell times. They also have a good impact on ranking.
Engaging hover effects, animated infographics, and process graphics are just some of the animated tools that you may use to improve user experience and boost your engagement rate. Just make sure that your animations are optimized, so they won’t affect your page load times.
- Embed Some Videos
More often than not, some people think that videos do not imply SEO because they’re not text-based content. However, including interesting videos on your site may increase the dwell time of visitors and engage users at the same time.
This increased number of views may also show a high page engagement, which may help websites increase their rankings on Google. So, embedding videos on your website can make a difference, as long as they don’t affect your website speed.
- Consider Adding Footer Links
If pages are linked to a website several times, it may help the search engines recognize the page’s importance and list it prominently. Footers are also the perfect place to include links to pivotal web pages such as sitemap links, key sub-navigation pages, and top-level navigation.
Including such in your footer design would increase the times they’re linked throughout the website without affecting the user experience. In-page links may also be used to improve the visibility of a page.
- Position Essential Content At The Top Of Your Page
Search engines may be lazy and read the page’s initial contents only. Thus, key subheadings, navigation links, and phrases must be made at the top. Key headings must be included first with a homepage brand strapline positioned second to them.
- Limit The Web Fonts
A web font may help you make your website more beautiful. However, including several fonts may be detrimental to your page’s loading speed. Luckily, Google Fonts provides practical and useful guidance about the use of web fonts, which makes it much easier to understand the speed implications.
- Pay Importance To Links, Content, And Keywords
Take note that the content on each of your web pages is critical for your website’s SEO success. During the process of creating your website, it’s recommended that web designers be aware of what your company is all about. This can make it possible for the lists of keywords to be selected in the development’s initial stages based on what users are likely to search for when finding information that relates to the website.
Content is very crucial in SEO, but it must be used properly to prevent unethical practices that could lower your ranking or result in search engines penalizing your website. Meaningful and strategic placement of keywords can also help you get a better ranking for your website in search results.
Adding keywords to your content while making web pages and posts can also cut down the time used to change your content just to make it optimized.
On the other hand, link building allows you to have links directed from some reliable websites to help you achieve good search engine rankings for your site. To achieve your desired results from proper link building and quality content, your website design should cater to SEO best practices.
- Integrate Interactive And More Dynamic Visual Content
Aside from being mobile-friendly across every platform, your website must also feature interactive and dynamic visual content that would captivate your audience’s attention and place you at the top of the search results.
Over the past few years, visual content has come a long way. Although it served a complementary purpose at first, it now supplements the available textual content.
Visual content can have the power to attract more views and traffic. Think of Facebook stories, YouTube vlogs, live videos, and infographics. All of these can make your website stand out and help set you apart from your competitors instead of focusing on textual content only.
Textual content like social media posts and blogs will remain relevant in website design and SEO, but their importance is shifting in the digital age where time-lapse videos and short videos are becoming popular these days. Incorporating more interactive and dynamic visual content on your website can help you ensure that your website design will work properly with your SEO. With this, you can attract more readers and engage users simultaneously.
- Track Your Digital Analytics
Think of analytics as the digital footprint of your website. Analytics show areas where your website excels as well as the areas where it should be improved. Tracking analytics accurately may also help you determine how well your website content is faring in the online market when it comes to which content pieces gain the most traction and which need to be scrapped or tweaked.
However, bear in mind that just because a particular piece of content has declined in online exposure, it doesn’t mean that it must be taken off of your site. There are times that all your content requires a little beefing up with revising, editing, or updating the outdated facts to make it compelling and relevant again. For this reason, you’ll notice particular facts-based content such as news article features and medical journals indicate at the top or end of the page when the content was last edited or updated.
- Improve Your Website Speed
Website speed in every digital platform is vital. The longer the users have to wait for a given page on your site to load, the more likely they can get frustrated and look for a better website. It doesn’t mean that people are impatient, it’s just that online users expect a website to load fast so they can get the information they need when they need it.
Good content coupled with a -responsive structure may help improve your website speed by making it much easier for search engines to crawl every page on your site in a few seconds. The quicker the search engines crawl the websites and find search-related content, the easier and faster it’ll load your site.
You may test the loading speed of your website by using the Page Speed Insights tool of Google. It’s also a good idea to use a combination of other tools that test your website speed or loading time, so you’ll have a clue on what to improve or remove from your website.
- Focus More On Navigation And Readability
Website readability is important. This involves how you structure the articles, the kind of language you use, and the writing style. Sentences must be short and on point while conveying all the essential information that users are searching for. You must also be catering to average readers to retain and obtain their attention.
Readability, of course, depends on the kind of audience that you want to cater to. For instance, if you’re running an online journal that caters to medical professionals, your content must have an appropriate writing style. However, if you’re running a medical website that’s made for average people searching for medical answers to their concerns or looking for advice, your writing style must reflect that.
In terms of the navigation of your website, how easily your target audience may find the information they’re searching for, and how easily they can navigate your site can make all the difference. So, consider some ways to help users navigate your page like adding internal linking, a clear site map, and search bars.
Bottom Line
Although it’s complicated to get into the little details about what makes the website design and SEO connected, being aware of the relationship between the two is crucial for your business. Just remember that having a good website design is equivalent to better bounce rates, which may result in better ranking in search engines. With good SEO, your website will get more traffic, which may then lead to more sales in the long run.