A website is at the core of any digital marketing campaign. And its performance mostly depends on the organic traffic it drives. While website design plays a crucial role in attracting more visitors, it’s the search engine optimization that helps a website reach global audience.
One important thing to consider here is that SEO needs to be built into the website design process, and not added in later. So, here are certain practices you will need to focus on during the web design process to improve the site’s performance.
1. Website Structure
A website without a clear and well-planned structure is as useless as a building without a foundation. You should also come up with something new and unique. Above all, follow a standard design for your site structure. Your visitors should land on the home page, for example, your site must have well-defined navigation, your sub-pages must be ordered and properly linked to one another.
2. Website Navigation System
A site’s navigation is important both for the users and the search engines. Hence, it should be easy-to-use and self-descriptive. For instance, you should always place the navigation menu in the side panel or at the top of the side. Also, you should link every page on your site to your navigation system. This will help your visitors to navigate to the desired page easily.
However, designers must keep in mind to avoid creating orphan pages – pages that aren’t linked to the navigation system in any way. Such pages won’t be considered by the search engines.
3. URL Structure
Your site’s URL is an important factor when it comes to site’s ranking. Hence, you must also optimize your site’s URL. Here are certain guidelines by Moz to help you optimize your website URL:
• Keep your URLs shorter as they are easy to remember and works better during web page crawling.
• It is a good SEO practice to create URLs that describe the content. Your URL must clearly indicate what’s your site is about or what all it has to offer.
• Make sure to include keywords in your URLs. Search engines prefer placing on top the pages with more keywords. And when a search engine looks for web pages, the first thing it looks for is the URL.
• Make your URL readable by using colon, hyphens, and dashes.
4. Site interface and User Experience
Make sure the technical aspects of your site structure don’t ruin your site’s interface and the user experience. A website that loads fast but lacks an interactive interface and amazing user experience won’t rank any good. Such a site will also fail to attract visitors for longer.
5. Content Structure
As you know that content is the king of search engine optimization. Hence, your site should have structured and well-managed data. This will boost your site in the search engine making it more readable, faster, and quicker to load. Well-organized content not only improves the site loading speed but quality content also brings in new traffic to the site.
6. Responsive Design
If you follow all the above-mentioned practices but fail to design a responsive website, all that hard work of yours will get wasted. It is crucial that your website must be compatible with every platform, be it a desktop, mobile phone, tablet, or an iPhone. Your site must work smoothly on all the devices.
The Take Away
If you want your website to work exceptionally, you must work on its design and SEO simultaneously. Remember, incorporating SEO in your design process will help you build a solid foundation for your site in the long run. So, plan your design process accordingly. And if you need professional assistance in understanding the SEO fundamentals of website design and implementing them, get in touch with experts at Midriff Info Solution Pvt. Ltd. For more details, contact us today.