When designing your website, you cannot ignore SEO. Companies of all sizes, whether multi-billion dollar corporations or mom-and-pop restaurants, can benefit from it. If you’re building a website from scratch, you need to follow the best SEO principles. These will make your website search engine friendly from the get to. You’ll find it easier to rank for specific keywords.
For a complete SEO guide, visit platforms like https://www.webitized.com/. Here are five essential SEO-driven web design strategies they suggest.
- Mobile-First Design Approach
When designing your website, you need to design it for mobile users. That’s because a majority of the people using the internet are surfing from their mobile devices. If they cannot navigate your website properly, you’ll be missing out on potential leads and sales.
The best way to ensure mobile-devices compatibility is to develop your website using a framework like Bootstrap. It automatically makes your website mobile-friendly, and it will look equally good on desktop and mobile.
Search engines like Google prefer mobile-friendly websites and rank them5 Essentials for a Modern and SEO-Optimized Web Design
on the results page. So from that point of view, you should ensure your website is mobile-friendly.
- Informative NavBar
A website refers to a vivid collection of web pages. To get the desired information, your web visitors need to go from one page to another. And to facilitate this, you need to have a navbar or navigation bar in place.
Navbar sits at the top of the web pages containing the links to important pages. Users can open the navbar and find out the page they’re looking for.
You can either design a fixed or sticky navbar. It will float at the top no matter what. But you also have the option of a vertical bar that remains hidden at the top corner.
You should ensure that the navbar points to all the essential pages.
- Site Structuring
Site structure defines how your web pages and content are organized. It explains how your website is grouped, linked, and presented. By looking at the site structure, Google determines which pages are more important. Hence, it serves those pages higher in the SERP.
Without this structure, search engines will not be able to determine which pages are essential. Even worse, you will have your pages competing against each other for ranking. This will reduce the effectiveness of your SEO campaign.
Therefore, always check for your site structuring when designing your website.
- Use Lightweight Multimedia Component
When designing a website, you must use a lot of graphics and multimedia like videos, animation. While it’s recommended that you use them to make your website visually appealing, use lightweight components. These components are low on memory and load faster.
If you’re using images, compress before using them. You should have them below 100 KB in size. The same thing goes for videos and animation.
- Proper Tags
Tagging is something that comes after the website is designed. But it’s very important. You should include the keywords in both title tags, meta tags, and alt tags.
These will improve your rankings immediately. You can do it yourself or ask the development team to implement it.
Website design is a continuous process. You’d have to update, improve, and optimize your website for maximum growth.
