With the increase in use of technology and digital gadgets, design of those gadgets and apps, be it web or app, has become an extremely important part of how those gadgets and apps are being accepted. Both SEO and web design must go hand in hand.
There are two things that can be affected by design: search engine readability and user experience. Both these points are extremely crucial while considering the SEO. Companies that solely focus on either design or digital marketing will notice that their web rankings will drop every time the search engines change their algorithm.
Defining the structure
A web design agency can give you the design files with a clearly defined structure. But if you don’t have one, it will be your responsibility to determine everything. Your website will be visited by your users. So when you create a website for your client, you need to have a logical structure in front of you that includes the main menu along with the categories and subcategories.
Your homepage will probably have The highest authority of all pages on the website will be with the homepage. There must also be small portions of all the important elements. Services, reviews, featured products and testimonials are some of the elements the website must contain. Every page structure needs to follows a certain logic. It should be followed by the hierarchically less important information. The H-tags or headings should go from the most important to least important. You should also try to include important information in the footer. This includes company title, address, contact details, some social media links etc.
URLs
You must create pretty URLs. Whenever you create a logical structure, you should name the folders and subfolders in an easy way. They must represent what they are supposed to represent. So you should not try to create generic URLs. Instead, you should try to focus on terms and keywords that describe the ultimate point of the page. It is also important to pay attention to the links that are also translated into different languages, if the site you are developing is multilingual. Your website product URLs should be shown in both the languages.
Consider the Page Speed
A crucial prerequisite for good ranking of your web page is the speed at which it loads. For this, the pages must be lightweight and fast enough to open in any part of the world ,even where there is a slow-speed Internet. This part must be taken care of right in the development part. For this, you must be sure that the pages you code are in sync with Google’s recommendations. The page speed of your web page can be checked in Google’s PageSpeed Insights. The results that you receive will show you both mobile and desktop performance. You will also receive some tips on how to fix the issues that you are facing.
Meta Tags
There are other on-page SEO elements that you need to take care of. Meta tags are one of those elements. It is not actually dependent on you to create the meta tags and descriptions. This part is where the content and marketing team has to get involved. This will help you boost your client’s website in a great way. The page you create must have a clearly stated title. This title should the one by which the users are informed and can Google the topic of the content on the page.
Meta descriptions need to have a few sentences that are of interest to the reader which makes them click on that same page. Meta descriptions had to be of certain length for a few years. But now you can write even longer descriptions of which can easily go up to 320 characters. All the images on the web page must contain alternative text. This is used to describe the image and also help it receive a better rank.
Valid Code
There can be scenarios where your HTML can end up being invalid. This is completely fine because there can be mistakes sometime. Whenever the site goes live and if it still has any errors in the code, it will end up affecting the ranking in a negative way. One of the major Google ranking factors is a valid code. So you better work on making the code the best. There are many online code validators to help you with this.
Analytics
Another important thing to do to help your client optimize their website is making use of analytics. Because every website is developed with the aim to get a higher rank on Google they must implement Google Analytics right from the day the website goes live. You have to download the asynchronous tracking code. You then add it to your website code. Make use of a tool that is freely available to you. Even your client will be able to track the visits. You get to generate more website traffic from AdWords.
Going Mobile
The days where people used to sit on an unresponsive websites and wait for hours are long gone. Every website must consider the mobile users that are coming from different devices like smartphone, tablet, smartwatch etc. If you really want Google to give you a higher rank in the SERP, then you need to make sure that it is easily adjusted for mobile phones. All the page content must be shown properly. It must also offer an overall good user experience (UX).
Wrap Up
Above-mentioned are some of the basic things you must be familiar with. You are not expected to learn all these things right from the first day. But this will give you an opportunity to know your website and business better. It also allows you to study your users, business, the market, and the overall potential it holds. These are the things that you only learn over time by working on them. You can hire a web designer and an seo company to help you with this.
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