Website Design and SEO go hand in hand. So much so that website designers need a basic understanding of SEO and vice-versa. A website design with maximum effort can even fail to drive significant traffic if it fails to make it to the top SERPs for given keywords. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a technique that enables webmasters to rank their website higher on Google search engine results. Apart from rankings, website traffic is also an integral goal of any SEO campaign. That being said, the focus should not just be on Google rankings but also on website traffic which can ultimately lead to conversions.
So, your website design must be done keeping these three things in mind:
- The website must be user-friendly.
- It must encourage high conversion rates
- It must be able to get users hooked onto the website.
- It must abide by basic technical SEO guidelines
So, now we are going to discuss some of the Website Design tips used by top website designing companies.
- Use Breadcrumb Navigation: Breadcrumb navigation refers to a site structure that allows users to understand the depth of the page they are in. This improves the user experience and thus increases your chances of ranking higher.
- Create easily navigable menus: The Menu for accessing various service pages or other pages must be clearly defined so that users don’t find it difficult to navigate to them. For this make, the menus are present in both the navigation bar and in the footer.
- Google Map Integration: In the contact section, apart from just manually adding the address it’s always better to integrate Google Map of the site owner’s location so that the visiting customers can easily locate the place. It also gives the website local geographical relevance which is important for ranking.
- Properly formatted sitemap: The sitemap which is to be submitted by the webmaster must be properly formatted so that it becomes easier for the Google bot to crawl your website on the internet.
- Banner Slideshow: Make sure your homepage banner has a slideshow relevant to the theme of the website. This makes the website looks lively and interactive. This would lead to more and more users stay on your website for a longer duration decreasing the bounce rate significantly and increasing the site spent on time which is crucial from an SEO point of view.
- Mobile Friendliness: Website Designers should try to make sure that the website is mobile friendly and the layout of the website must be optimized for mobile phone users. This ensures that you don’t miss out on a large chunk of mobile traffic. Also. Google’s Mobilegeddon update makes it important for a website to be mobile-friendly to rank higher.
- High Page Load Speed: Page Load speed is another highly neglected aspect of website design. Users don’t like to wait longer for a website to load and thus would be likely to bounce off a website if the website does not load quickly. This increases the bounce rate significantly increasing the concerns for the webmasters.
So, we saw some of the key factors which every website designer must keep in mind if they have to design a website that can, not just rank well but also invite traffic and sales for the webmaster. The best thing about Google’s algorithm is that as a webmaster you don’t worry about both rankings and user-friendliness of a website. The latest SEO guidelines always stress how users might judge a website. If Google finds that a website might be of low quality from the end user’s perspective then it won’t take any time to decrease its rankings.