Tips to Design an SEO Friendly Website

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A website can be considered as a virtual sales counter for your business. A good customer-friendly website is the face of your business that represents your company. But it can only work as such when you deploy a great website for your business.
For example, Adobe has a friendly, not so salesy, and simple website that cherishes the audience.
Even a good website can only reach people through efficient internet marketing tactics. And one such effective marketing strategy is search engine optimization or SEO.
Search engines do not see the websites as we do. They crawl through the website codes to figure out the images, content, video, audio, and infographics to understand the context. Once the crawling process is over, your website can take its place in the search engine’s ranking pages and show up when people search with relevant keywords.
But how to ensure that the website ranks on the first page of the search engines? Because only when your website has a good ranking will it receive traffic.
The answer is by incorporating SEO right at the time of designing a website for your business. With SEO, you can ensure your website gets visibility on various search engine pages like Google and Bing.

Strategies to Design an SEO Friendly Website

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A good SEO-friendly website keeps both the users and the search engines in mind. What strategies can you deploy for a great-looking website that will also make it to the search engines' top pages? Let's find out!

1. Create a Responsive Design for Your Website

More users are now comfortable browsing the internet from their mobile phones than the computer. The stats below give a glimpse of it.
The number of users accessing the internet via their mobile phones is steadily increasing. It would help if you tapped this audience right at the beginning.
What we mean is, you should design your website, keeping the mobile users in mind. Make your website mobile-responsive so that it is accessible from all kinds of devices like tablets, mobiles, and desktops.
To achieve this, design a responsive template for your website. It will automatically resize the contents of the website as per the size of the screen.
There are a large number of free templates available on the internet. You can either use any one of them or create a customized template design. There are also free generators available for generating a personalized theme or a template.

2. Choose an SEO Friendly Domain

It is vital to choose an SEO-friendly domain name for your business website.
Ideally, it should reflect the industry of your business or products.
For instance, if you are a retailer of IT products, choose a domain name that reflects IT services. That way, your website can hit the target market that is looking for IT products online. When the target audience can identify their brand requirements online, they will rely on your website more.
Choose a domain name that is out of the box yet reflects your brand value. The name should be unique yet easy to remember. It should leave a mark on the mind of the audience that comes across your website online.
The best way to do that is to list the most searched keywords for your product and finalize your website's domain name accordingly.
For example, “Client success” is a keyword having a commendable number of searches and belongs to a niche, so choosing such domains is a smart move.

Related : Best Keyword Research Tools Used By Top SEO Companies

Related : Common Keyword Research Mistakes People Often Do In SEO

3. Ensure Easy Website Navigation

Design your website with helpful information about the products and services that you offer. At the same time, make sure that all the information is readily available to the users. Meaning, you need to ensure that the website navigation is convenient for the users.
Moving from one webpage to another should be seamless and natural for the users visiting your page.
It shouldn’t complicate or confuse the audience after they land on your site.
To make your website's navigation accessible, create and provide a sitemap of the website on the home page. A sitemap will allow the user to visit any page they wish to, from the home page.

4. The Content Flow Should Add Value to Your Website

As it is often said that the "content is the king." And, it is rightfully so. Hence, put in as much information as you want on your website. But maintain the clarity. Do not use too much jargons in the text.
The content of the website should be easy to read and understand. Certain plugins like Yoast SEO help you refine your content to make it quality content.
It should add value to your website and not create clutter. Only when users find something useful on your website will they turn into a customer for your products.
Use titles and subtitles in the web content and link them to different landing pages with more relevant information. That way, users will return to your website whenever they are looking for a particular service, product, or information.

Related : Benefits of Creating High converting Landing pages for Ecommerce

5. Use Natural Keywords and SE-optimized Text

Remember, Google and other search engines crawl the website's content to index it on the search engine pages. So, the text on the website holds a lot of importance. Thus, to have a significant rank on the search engine pages, you need to use keywords and SE-optimized texts in your web content.
Use this free tool to ensure the keyword density of 1-3%.
Ensure the text on your website is free from plagiarism, spelling, and grammar mistakes.
If you have videos or images on the website, add titles and subtitles that are keyword-friendly. The meta descriptions for the website should also use important long-tail keywords.

6. The Website Design Should Be Light yet Attractive

The loading speed of the website matters most in SEO. The lighter is the website, the easier it is to download. The faster is the loading speed of the website, the better is the user experience. And when the user experience is excellent, the users will return to the website often.
Using infographics and images is an easy and attractive way to engage the visiting audience. It appeals to the users more than just simple web texts. But make sure to optimize the images on the website.
Gone are the days of Graphic designers and adobe photoshop to have excellent and attractive images. Now anyone can design creative images and infographics using free accounts on Canva.
Do not add too many images on the site, as it can make the website heavy. Such websites load slowly, and it affects the user experience in the long run.
Also, add keyword-friendly text to the images and the infographics. It will enhance the visibility of your website on the search engine pages.

7. Create SEO Friendly Dropdowns on Your Website

SEO recommends cascading style sheet (CSS) for creating the menus on the website.
Using text-based navigation can make it easier for not only the users to navigate your website but also for the search engines.This offers a great customer experience making users spend more time on it and let search engines know the site is great.

8. Avoid 404 Error

Often when a webpage is not available, it shows a 404 error on the screen. Avoid getting this error on your website. Regularly update your website content so that you can avoid 404 errors.
If you delete any old pages on the website, you need to add new pages and redirect the old URL to this new one. Be careful about redirecting the old pages to the new ones. If there is any mistake in the redirection, the search engine will not crawl the new page for indexing.

9. Use 301 Redirects

Using 301 redirects will help you in retaining the traffic on your website. With the help of 301 redirects, your website informs Google crawlers that the older version of the webpage is replaced with a newer one.
You can do it easily by installing any 301 redirect plugins to your site.
Make sure to add optimized keywords in the updated and new permalinks when redirecting the URL to a new page. It will help the search engine bots to read and index your new webpage instead of the old or the deleted ones.

10. Tap the Social Media Audience with Your Website

Do not miss out on the vast market of social media platforms. Add options to connect the social media via your website.
Connecting via social media will help you enhance the traffic to your website and thus contribute to SEO.
People may not Google search everyday, but they sure do check out social media platforms. People rather connect with a real social media person than a chatbot on the site.
Also, social media platforms are a preferred channel of communication for numerous customers. So, why not tap this audience for your business too?

Benefits of Designing an SEO Friendly Website

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Having an SEO-friendly website has immense benefits. It will enhance your website's visibility by providing your website with a higher rank on the search engine pages.
Some of the benefits that you can reap with an SEO-friendly website are:

1. Create Brand Awareness

The websites that rank higher in the top search engine results hold more credibility than the websites that fail to show up in top results. Hence, the fight to keep the top rank is very tough, and only when you have an SEO-friendly website, you gain an edge in this competition.
Ranking on the search engine pages will give your website visibility and create brand awareness amongst the users.

2. Get Better Return on Investment with SEO

Basic SEO services are relatively cost-effective and will not burn a hole in your pocket. And hence, getting such a service for your website will give you a better return on investment. It can improve sales and enhance your business performance to a considerable extent.
It’s vital for you to invest in SEO to push your product/service infront of the right audiences.
The return on investment with SEO services is much better than the profits from paid campaigns. Instead of investing a considerable amount of capital on extensive advertisement campaigns, it is better to boost sales with simple SEO services.
Hire a professional who can design your website with good SEO features. Your website will achieve a better ranking on the search engine pages, thus boosting sales.

3. Get an Edge over Your Rivals

Every business follows an SEO tactic to stay ahead in the industry.
Why would you stay behind?
Reap the benefits of SEO in this competitive market. Design your website as per the search engine requirements and boost the revenues for your business.
An expert SEO professional will design an SEO-friendly website for you and maintain it with SEO features. It will boost organic traffic to your website and also generate more revenue for your business. You will, thus, stay ahead of your business rivals.

4. Track the Recorded Data for Your Website

When you have an SEO-friendly website, you have access to track the recorded data of the site—called analytics. You can later use these data points to analyze whether your visitors clicked your website at random or planned a visit.

Related : SEO Data: What is it? And Its Importance for Your Business

You can also determine the source from where your visitors have come to your website. You will be able to track the sales details too and the pages visited by most people.
With an SEO-friendly website, it is also easy to find out the keywords that have generated the most traffic.
Knowing the keywords with which the users searched for your website, you can improve your content. It will boost the traffic and also generate new sales. It will also help your website rank better on the search engine pages.

5. An SEO Friendly Website Offers Great User Experience

When you design a mobile responsive website and easy to load, it creates a better user experience. When your visitors can navigate your website seamlessly and find what they are looking for, it makes a great user experience.
When users find what they are looking for, they will keep returning to the website. They will also possibly turn into loyal customers and publicize the website to their peers.
Thus, you can reap many benefits with minimal effort. Optimizing your websites for Search engines will have a rippling effect that keeps giving returns. Tap the immense visibility that an SEO-friendly website can bring to your business.
Hire a good SEO professional to take care of your website design.

Website Design Tips & SEO FAQs

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Here are some helpful SEO-friendly website design tips given as answers to FAQs.

1. Does SEO Matter for Website Design? How?

Yes, SEO is one of the critical factors for website designing. Google uses algorithms and bots to measure various factors like the number of visitors on the page, bounce rate, page interaction, etc.
Search engines also look at how user-friendly the website is and how fast it loads. They also emphasize user experience.
These factors can help in the ranking of the website. And, these factors are all taken care of when designing an SEO-friendly website. Thus, SEO does have a significant impact on website designing.

2. What Are Some of the Best SEO Tips for Website Design?

• Do not scatter a lot of information on your website. It is vital to organize the website's content in a user-friendly manner to be readily available to website visitors.
• Do not overload the website with lots of images and graphics, making the page heavy. When a page becomes heavy, it takes longer to load, which hurts the user experience.
• Always highlight the services or products but keep the language of the content simple and easy to understand.

3. Do You Need SEO for a One Page Website?

To make it to the top of the search engine ranking pages, you need to optimize a website regardless of its size.
When you optimize a website with relevant SEO factors, it can show up on the search engine result pages for relevant searches. So, even for a single-page website, SEO is essential.

4. How Can a Website Rank on the Search Engines?

You must implement these SEO tactics for making a website popular with search engines. So, hire a good SEO professional who can take care of the website right from the designing stage to maintaining it.
Only when all the SEO factors are considered and implemented for a website can it start ranking on the search engine pages. Of course, patience is the key. Ranking on the search engine pages does not happen overnight.
Optimize the website with relevant keywords, mobile responsive theme, etc., at timely intervals.

5. What Are the Tips for a Great Website Design?

• Make the first impression of your website memorable for a visitor. That can only happen when the website's design is such that it makes a lasting impression in a visitor's mind. Design a fantastic logo for your brand and place it on the website in such a manner that it hits the eyes of the visitor at first glance.
• Create an easy sitemap that can help the users in navigating from one page to another quickly. It will enhance the user experience for your website, and users will love what they see.
• Make sure to add valuable information to your website. Unless there is any helpful information, a user will never want to stay on. But if they find data relevant to them, they will keep coming back and start relying on your website.

6. What Mistakes Should Be Avoided for Website Designing?

Designing a website is not an easy task. But it is crucial to make it SEO friendly for gaining an advantage on the search engine pages. There are certain mistakes you should avoid while designing an SEO-friendly website. The mistakes are

Slow Loading Website

When you use lots of images and infographics on the website and make it heavier, it takes more time to load. People are not ready to wait long for a website to load. If the loading speed is slow, users will move elsewhere, and your website will lose traffic.
Adding lots of images and infographics might make your website look attractive. But, in the long run, it will create a negative impact on the search engine pages. It will affect the traffic on your website and eventually affect your sales.

Difficult Navigation

You should organize the website content to make it easy for the users to find what they are looking for.
If navigation is difficult, users will move away to other better user-friendly websites and easy to navigate. Hence, make sure your website design is simple. It should be easy for users to move from one page to another.
Follow these tips and make your website design SEO-friendly. Drop your details here to schedule a free consultation with an SEO and web design expert.