Building your website with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind will help it reach a wider audience. An attractive, user-friendly design that implements good SEO is what makes a website rank higher in search engine results. At New Wine Digital, we make SEO a priority when designing websites for small businesses. Let’s take a look at what you should consider when designing an SEO-friendly website.
Why Is It Important to Design Your Website with SEO in Mind?
No matter how good your website looks, it can’t attract customers if they never see it. The most effective way to ensure your website gains more visibility is by starting out with a strong SEO website design and frequently updating your site with fresh, optimized content.
Strong SEO helps Google easily crawl your website to find out what it can offer a web user when they enter a search query. This leads to a higher ranking on Google (and other search engines) and helps people easily find your business.
How to Make an SEO-Friendly Website: Six Things to Optimize
1: Code
The best way to encode a website for SEO is to use HTML and CSS code. Search engines can’t read Flash files well, so they will be unable to crawl and index your website properly if you build it using Flash, leading to low search result rankings. You can incorporate Flash into your website design if you want to, but you should only do so sparingly.
2: Navigational Structure
Keep your website navigation clean and simple to create a more user-friendly interface. User-friendliness is a key ranking factor for Google, because its algorithm wants to deliver the best possible results to web users. Your navigation menu should be logically organized, contain all essential pages, and appear at the top or left side of the screen.
3: URL Structure
Whether you’re creating a blog post, service page, or product page, URL structure is another important element in search engine optimization. Every webpage URL for your website should include the target SEO keyword for that page. Using keywords in your URLs will help Google understand what each page is about, and which keyword to rank it for.
4: Site Structure
The way you structure your website is also important to SEO. Each page should cover a single topic and include target keywords that relate to that topic. You can help Google understand your site structure better by adding links to related pages on your site, as well as links to other reliable sources. This practice helps you establish yourself as an authority on a topic, which makes your business rank higher in searches and seem more trustworthy to web users.
5: Heading Tags
Breaking up your informational content with heading tags helps both web users and Google read your copy more easily. Make sure to use heading tags in an appropriate sequence—for example, H1 is for titles, H2 is for headings, H3 is for subheadings, and so on. You should also add your target keyword to your H1 tag and a few headings and subheadings to help improve your SEO.
6: Images
Copy isn’t the only thing that requires optimization. Google also reads information associated with your images, like their file names and sizes, when determining how to rank your website. Use descriptive file names and alt text to help Google understand the context behind the image. You should also stick to smaller file sizes to help your website load faster, which creates a better user experience.
SEO Web Design Services
There are many essential elements that go into designing an SEO-friendly website. If you need help creating a successful website that puts SEO first, contact the web design experts at New Wine Digital. We design clean, modern websites that boost visibility for small businesses. Call us at 480-516-1819 today to discuss how our services can help drive more traffic to your website.
Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (9/12/2022). Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash