Wondering how search engine optimization and web design go hand in hand & why does it matter to your business? If yes, there is so much to tell you about! Come, let’s dive deeper into it.
If you’re managing a business or a website, then good SEO can help you with your digital presence.
How will you determine a good SEO?
Good SEO will scale your business presence online and helps you in branding and lead acquisition, which is still a dream for many people.
Do you know, SEO and web design go hand in hand with one other? It is because a poor web design will definitely make a negative impact on Google and various other search engine’s guidelines. And that is why it really gets important for your business to optimize your website design according to SEO norms.
Come, let’s now have a look at how Calgary SEO Companies believe SEO and web design are related to each other and why you must focus on a search engine optimized website design.
How Does SEO Work?
Before we directly jump into this, let’s have a quick review on how does it (SEO) actually work on Google. Well, the Google search engine makes use of web crawlers to crawl the search engine in pursuit of suitable websites that would likely be able to provide solutions to what users are seeking (search queries).
There are three primary functions served by search engines:
Crawl – Scour the whole Internet for content, examining the content or code for every URL it finds.
Index – Store and manage the content found in the crawling process. And once a webpage is indexed, it is going to be shown to some relevant queries.
Rank – Show up the content that answer’s the searcher’s query best. The results are ordered in most relevant to the least relevant pattern.
What Matters For Search Engines?
Although it’s a technologically advanced and fast-paced world, but web crawlers still rank your website based on its text. Primarily, this is why it’s been suggested by many marketers to get all your internal linking and main pages simple to read and organize well. If not, you risk it being really hard for the web crawler to fulfill its job effectively.
It does not matter if there are sliders, videos, flash images, gifs, and attractive animations; still, there should text-based content present on the website.
PRO TIP – Making use of things such as Google web fonts is going to make it simpler for Goggle to read your website content, whereas sites such as Link Now can help you with the optimization thing.
Remember that – in the end, Google simply wants to read your website thoroughly. It is also going to reward you if it feels so. And this is what you need to hold in now and beyond. Let’s now have a look at some specific areas:
Fundamentals
There are some core elements that set the stage for optimized website design process.
Hosting
Hosting in an important thing! A slow-running site makes users unhappy. Updated rules should be followed while hosting. You need to be situated where your target audience is situated. Try to be more platform-specific and quick, to make out the most.
Domains
Ensuring your domain makes sense and relates to what your business does is super important. No need to be fooled by thinking adding keywords in domain name is going to help. This only seems to be a draft; so be sensible in it. In fact, ensuring that all sub-domains and variations are effectively pointing on the website & re-directing to every canonical version of the website is important too.
CMS (Content Management System)
CMS is going to decide a lot of things. WordPress is one great option preferred by many businesses. It is wired up in a way Google can understand. This is not to mean WordPress is the ideal choice every time, but indeed it is one great starting point for many businesses. You only need to be certain that the CMS you choose is the right one for your business requirements.
Internal Linking
It is important to make crawlers discover your internal links. And for that, you need to ensure all the tools and primary navigation let other webpages to be discovered easily.
PRO TIP – There are many tools that can help you in this, and Screaming Frog is one amongst the list!
XML Sitemap
The XML sitemap makes search engine understand a website structure while crawling. As you pass more data to search engine, you can know webpages that are more valuable and hence give them a priority.
Follow W3 Norms
Google love clear and well-organized code. Well, who doesn’t? Clear code can make the site index easily, and often exhibits how well the site is designed. Following W3C norms further make you write semantic code, which is actually a good thing for SEO.
Optimize Images
Images are an important element of the website. However, many times it gets overlooked when it happens to SEO optimization. Integrate some effective tricks and have superbly optimized images.
Clear Homepage
A clear homepage makes it easy for Google to understand what your business does and how it can help the users seeking for the services you’re already trading in. Therefore, make sure to include important things such as your services, keywords, company name, testimonials, nature of your services because this is what Google is actually looking for.
In fact, make sure to get all these in a text-based format so that it gets easy for the Google crawlers to crawl it. And if a crawler is not able to find it, then my dear friend, it is completely worthless for you, as no one is going to visit your website anyway.
Use Heading & Sub-Heading Tags Carefully
Ensure to make the right use if heading tags in your website content. Heading tags provide Google with data on the structure of the html document. Many times, they also give more value on these tags as compared to other text.
<h1>Heading</h1>
<h2>Heading</h2>
<h3>Heading</h3>
<h4>Heading</h4>
<h5>Heading</h5>
Use JavaScript Cautiously
Many businesses make use of JavaScript overly in their whole site. Google crawl through different site to index them and then decide their rankings. If the site has an over usage of JavaScript, Google will find it hard to understand the site and will cause crawling problems. JavaScript don’t even works well on smartphone devices.
URLs
Web crawlers usually use the structure of the Uniform resource locator to get the context of your site’s internal links. The best thing to be followed over here is by staying consistent with the structure and names of your internal links. It would work great if you keep it as clear as you can.
Let’s suppose if your website is an online business offering online education courses and books, then you should do blog posts on topics such as:
Why should students consider reading our notes?
How can academic revision notes help you score better?
Now, suppose its
.com/reading-our-notes
.com/7-15-2019/
.com/score-better-marks
Have you noticed how does the second link is going so out-of-the-way? In fact, in such a case, Google is going to get in figuring out what this is and hence will not give the credit for posting the blog. Hence, it becomes a must to ensure that website URLs are consistent, aligned, and address the search engine that is a post all about.
SEO and Web design Altogether
This is how SEO and Web Design go hand in hand. It gets essential for you and your business to consider how web crawlers and your users will perceive your website. In addition to this, get a website designed in such a way that it is simple to navigate so that anyone can know your offerings.
Let’s Fix Your Web Design and SEO Today!
Understanding the connection between web design and SEO is the key to strengthening your website. It is also your path to maximizing your website’s potential and finding ways to reach out to the target audiences.
If you are thinking of redoing your site but do not know where to begin, then Calgary web design can help you with the best.
Connect with us and request a design quote. Let us know precisely what you want, and we can start working on your web design and SEO!