Search engine optimization (SEO) is a valuable digital marketing strategy for businesses that want to drive more traffic to their sites and increase exposure for their brands.
SEO design is an essential aspect of this strategy that focuses on your website design.
Today, we’re going to discuss what you need to know about SEO design. We will start by looking at what SEO is and how it relates to web design. From there, we’ll provide you with concrete steps to optimize your website design for top rankings.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization, widely known as “SEO,” is a digital marketing technique designed to help websites rank high on search engines.
High rankings on Google are the primary goal of many SEO strategies, but the technique can be applied to other platforms with a search engine element, such as online marketplaces and social media sites.
SEO uses an organic approach to ranking, as opposed to other search engine marketing (SEM) techniques that use paid advertisements to rank high.
The intersection of web design and SEO
When it comes to optimizing your website for search engines, there are many layers. Your ranking ability is strongly influenced by the conception and design of your web site.
Even if you have a bulletproof content marketing strategy that includes beautifully crafted written content, such as valuable blog posts and informative landing pages, the design of your website will determine whether or not it ranks.
The key to SEO design is to make your site easy to use, aesthetically consistent and quick to load. The design must meet search engine guidelines while providing a valuable user experience.
Search engines have become incredibly intelligent, so it’s important to be strategic with a well-rounded SEO strategy.
How to optimize your website design for high rankings
Designing a website optimized for SEO is crucial to improving your website’s potential ranking. With that in mind, here are some ways to optimize your website design to improve your rankings.
1. Create a Responsive Website
User experience is paramount, so it’s crucial to create a consistent experience that spans all devices. Most websites are initially designed to be viewed on a computer, but with the popularity of smartphones and tablets, a seamless mobile experience is essential.
Ensure that your site is optimized for mobile view.. Creating a responsive website makes it easy to access all pages so that the mobile experience is equivalent to the desktop experience.
2. Improve site speed
Search engine algorithms take into account metrics such as site speed. The longer it takes for your site to load, the more it negatively impacts the SEO health of your site.
There are many ways to increase the performance of a website. Compression is one of the most important actions to improve your site speed. When your site’s media is compressed and lightweight, the site will load faster. You can also compress images to optimize them.
Taking advantage of content delivery network support can help improve your server response time. This can be done at the website hosting level, and it will also increase the speed of your site.
If you are having trouble assessing your site’s speed issues, we recommend taking advantage of dedicated tool support, such as Moz Pro, GTmetrix or Pingdom.
3. Organize an attractive design
One other way to enhance your site in SEO terms is by making the design attractive visually. Keep a consistent theme throughout and use a combination of media, such as text, images and videos to create a more engaging experience.
The design should also be accessible, which means it should be easy to read, especially for people with visual impairments. The text should be a decent size and the color of the text should not conflict with the background color of the page.
It should also be spaced and aligned in a visually appealing manner.
4. Build a robust web of internal links
One way to make your site rankable is to build a strong connection between pages and publications on your site. You can do this by linking relevant content across multiple points on your website.
Links between pages provide additional context for search engines to help them analyze your content more effectively.
One way to approach this is to create a series of landing pages around your core offerings and a series of blog posts that connect to that anchor content. At a very basic level, these pages can be linked to each other with strategically placed hyperlinks.
You can also create a variety of blog posts that will also link to these pages. For example, let’s say you have a landing page that covers “digital marketing.” You can create a series of articles that cover who needs digital marketing, the best digital marketing techniques, how to develop a digital marketing strategy, etc.
5. Optimize your metadata
It’s extremely important to update metadata across your site. Title tags and meta descriptions are attached to each page and published on your website. These can be optimized with the keywords you are targeting.
As a general rule, you want to keep title tags between 50 and 70 characters. Meta descriptions should be less than 165 characters long.
It’s also a good idea to use alt text for your images so that search engines can parse them as well. Create the alt text for your image by describing the image in 5-10 words. You can also take advantage of the strategic use of keywords in the title tags.
6. Take advantage of on-page optimization
In addition to your overall web design, there are several other on-page optimization techniques you should leverage.
First and foremost, it’s essential to create content that targets viable keywords. Conduct keyword research to identify the type of keywords your target audience is looking for and create content that addresses those keywords. This content can be published on blog posts and landing pages.
Remember that you are writing for the user as much (or more) as you are writing for the search engine. Make the content valuable and avoid keyword stuffing or any other spamming techniques designed to fool the search engines.
Some other on-page SEO techniques include URL optimization, proper header markup, strategic use of keywords in headers, and use of lists to improve readability.
Final thoughts
SEO design is a great technique for those who want to improve their search engine rankings to drive more traffic to their sites. This can increase brand awareness and help increase sales.
Since there are many moving parts to SEO design, it is often easier to rely on the assistance of professionals.
Juba Web offers a variety of services for web design and on-page SEO. Request a proposal to learn more about how we can help you with SEO design.