Search engines are the best traffic source for any website. Not only is the traffic relevant and of high intent, but they are also free. Unlike AdWords, you do not have to spend money to acquire this traffic. Therefore, it’s important to optimize your website for search engines. The process of optimization starts when you are developing the website. So, the web design agency you are working with must take care of SEO optimization techniques, some of which are mentioned in this guide.
What is Web Design?
The process of organizing, conceiving, and designing the presentation of material on the internet is known as web design. The design of a website, as it is done today, takes into account not just its appearance but also its total operation. In addition, web design includes the development of web apps, mobile apps, and user interface design.
Did you know that the design of your website may have a significant influence on how well your website performs in search engines like Google? This article will give you some helpful tips on how to make a website that not only looks good but also works well and ranks high in search results.
In this post, we are going to discuss
- Finding Inspiration
- Choosing a Tool for Web Design
- Visual Elements
- Functional Elements
The Difference Between Adaptive and Responsive Web Design
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Make the Website Mobile Friendly
The first thing you need to do to optimize your website is to make it mobile-friendly. In other words, it should load and function the same way, if not better, as it does on the desktop.
Google prefers websites that are optimized for mobile use. That’s because more people than ever are using mobile phones to search for information. So if your website is not functioning correctly on mobile devices, it will find it harder to rank in SERPs.
To make your website mobile-optimized, you must use a framework like Bootstrap. The framework, when used on your website, automatically readjusts to the screen size. Other frameworks like Foundation and Angular also make your website mobile-responsive. So always implement such a framework when designing your website.
Increase the Website Speed
Your website’s speed is crucial when it comes to SEO. The websites and web pages that load faster rank higher than those that don’t. So how do you make your website speed load faster? By decreasing its overall size. You must make minimal use of tools like Flash. These often have a large file size, which can drastically reduce the loading speed.
You must also compress the graphics and image size. The larger these files will be, the slower your website will load. Your hosting type and server location also affect the loading speed. So take care of all of these factors when web design.
Have a Sitemap in Place
Search engines crawl your website to see what it is about. The bots cannot read the content as humans do. And to understand this, they first look for the sitemap.
A sitemap is essentially a file that contains all the information about the pages, videos, and other files on the website. By referring to the sitemap, search engines like Google know which pages are essential and which ones are not. Then it ranks the web pages accordingly.
You can check your website crawlability with a tool like Screaming Frog. Your main pages should be text-based and not pure videos. The search engine bots can read through texts but not video files.
Take Care of Information Architecture and Structuring
When designing your website, you should think of it as a file cabinet. You put similar documents in one cabinet and highly confidential ones in another. You rarely mix things up.
Similarly, your website should be categorized and subcategorized in various folders. This architecture will make it easier for web crawlers to find and rank your website. If your web pages are random, they may never rank well on SERPs.
The Fonts and Graphics Should be Legible
Your website should be readable and legible to all the users who visit your website and read through the pages. If they can’t, they’ll hit the back button and leave. This will increase your bounce rate, and that will affect your SEO score.
Many designers make the mistake of using fonts that are too small for a mobile device. Therefore, you must use a bigger, cleaner font. The second thing to take care of is the color combination. If you’re using a black background, it’s better to use a light color for text.
These things will make your website useful for site visitors. Web design is always evolving, with technologies and techniques emerging every year. It’s essential to stay up to date with these changes to optimize your website for search engines.