Whether you are a small business owner designing your website for the first time or thinking about redesigning an existing one, you have to wonder about the introductions and changes that need to be made for making your web design search engine friendly. Ensuring that the design of your website is search engine optimized can aid you in ensuring that you can get high rankings, which can impact the volume of traffic and your sales and profits in the long run. There are lots of things you have to consider in order to make your website design search engine friendly, but the top five things that every small business owner should be aware of are discussed here:
Number 1- Your website design has to be responsive.
As far as small businesses are concerned, the local ones in particular, it is incredibly important to have good rankings in mobile search. Why? First off, about 50% of the people who conduct a search on mobile visit the shop within a few days of their search. In addition, more than 70% of the searches done via mobile eventually end up leading to offline purchases. You need to have a mobile friendly website design if you want to do well in mobile search results. Responsive web design is considered the best because it offers the same experience to smartphone users, tablet visitors and those on desktop as well.
Having a responsive web design saves you from the effort of creating multiple pages for various screen sizes. All you have to do is create a normal website design and the responsive template or theme will make the necessary adjustments for fitting on any screen.
Number 2- The text should be your focus.
While almost all types of media are crawled by search engines for determining the rank of a website, it is undeniable that good old text remains the ideal option for search engine optimization. This is one of the primary reasons why content marketing has gained such importance; every page of your website needs to have written content. Every page needs to have text even if it is in a small amount. If an audio or video is posted, it is best to have a text-based transcription as well.
Text is also required for the META description and SEO title for every page, which have to be unique and should also comprise of the main keywords or phrases for optimization purposes. Most businesses make the mistake of mentioning crucial information in images rather than text. However, text contained in images isn’t tracked by search engine crawlers and using a text-version for providing important information is recommended in order to be discovered.
Number 3- Images should also be optimized.
Yes, text is important, but so are images and they also need to be optimized for better search visibility. When you use text for this purpose, you can enjoy double benefits. This is due to the fact that your product page will be optimized for a specific keyword phrase and it will also give your image the golden opportunity of appearing in the image search results of search engines like Google. There are several ways you can use text for optimizing your images. Firstly, the filename of the image can be renamed for including a specific phrase or keyword. In this way, the main keywords can also become part of the images. Secondly, all HTML attributes should be used for inserting images on webpages. Thirdly, you can also write a caption beneath the image explaining the purpose of the image or its content.
Number 4- A proper navigation structure is required.
Another important rule for SEO friendly website design is to make a website that has text links and a clear hierarchy. There should be at least one static text link that can be used for reaching every page. You should take the organization of your website into account when you are planning the link structure. This could be simple, depending on the number of pages on your website because you can simply create a main navigation bar that links to all webpages of the site. Sometimes it can be complicated too as you have to think of categories and subcategories and the pages contained in each.
If you wish to provide a streamlined and smooth user experience, it is best to stick to just three levels. Your job should be to simplify the experience rather than making your customer jump from hoop to hoop in order to reach their desired destination. Apart from clear navigation for your visitors, the website should also boast simple text links in the footer for the main page of the website. In this way, you can rest assured that search engine crawlers and visitors alike will be able to discover it.
Number 5- Redirecting is also necessary.
When you are redesigning your website instead of making it for the first time, you should bear in mind that the old pages shouldn’t be completely scrapped. If you remove the page, your visitors will be informed that it doesn’t exist any longer. SEO expert Neil Patel writes in his post on what is SEO, if the page had a good ranking in search engines, but doesn’t open anymore; it will be removed from the search engine results. This means that you will end up losing traffic, which you were receiving previously. Hence, it is a better decision to redirect the old page to a new one in order to continue receiving the traffic.
The same concept is applicable when you are updating the permalinks on your website. If you wish to incorporate keyword-optimized permalinks in your website, it is essential for you to redirect the previous URLS to the new ones to prevent loss of traffic and potential customers. You can also customize a 404 page where you provide your visitors with alternative links if they are unable to access a particular page or URL.
When you incorporate these tips, your website design will become search engine friendly as well as visitor friendly and improve the functionality as a whole.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1N8oKLP via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1NnaUcW
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