As a business, it is essential to have an online presence. In order to make the most of your online presence, you need to have a website that is built with quality in mind. Unfortunately, a lot of websites fail the quality benchmark for 2 reasons. The first reason is that businesses often do not spend enough time researching and planning the structure of their website before they start building it. The second reason is that many web designers are not aware of the best practices for making a website accessible, usable, and SEO friendly. This often results in poorly built websites that don’t reach their potential. As per a study done by Forbes, over 70% of online businesses fail to reach their potential because of a poorly designed website.
In this article, we will discuss some guidelines that web designers should follow to build better websites. Following these guidelines will help your website reach its potential by making it more accessible, usable, and search engine friendly.
Checklist for Improving SEO in Web Design
1. Make your website mobile responsive
A responsive website design is one that adapts to the device it is being viewed on. This means that your website will look and function correctly whether it is being viewed on a desktop computer, a tablet, or a smartphone. In order to make your website mobile responsive, you need to use responsive design techniques. These techniques include using fluid layouts, media queries, and flexible images. Testing your website on different screen resolution is also important to ensure that it looks and functions correctly on all devices.
2. Improve your page loading speed
The speed of your website is important for two reasons. The first reason is that it impacts the user experience. A slow website is frustrating to use and will often result in users bouncing off to another website. The second reason is that page speed is a ranking factor for Google. This means that if your website is slow, it is likely that it will rank lower in the search results. In order to improve your page loading speed, you need to optimize your code, minify your resources, and use a content delivery network. Always place links to external style-sheets before any links to external scripts in page code. Avoid internal/inline styles and scripts. Choosing appropriate image format and size also helps improve loading speed.
3. Keep your website lightweight
A lightweight website will have a lower page size and fewer DOM requests. This means that it will take less time to load, which is important for both the user experience and search engine ranking. As a rule of thumb, your pages should be less than 100kb in size and have less than 50 DOM requests. You can use tools like Google’s Developers Tool Insights to check the page size and number of DOM requests for your website.
4. Optimize your images
Images are an important part of any website, but they can also be a major contributor to slow page loading speed. In order to optimize your images, you need to ensure that they are the correct size, format, and resolution. You can use tools like Photoshop or GIMP to edit your images. Embedding text in image is a bad practice for SEO as the text in images cannot be read by search engine bots. Scaling images in HTML will result in a lower quality image. Always include descriptive image ALT and title.
5. Improve your URL structure
Your website’s URL structure is important for both the user experience and search engine optimization. A well-organized URL structure will make your website easier to navigate and will also help search engines index your website more effectively. As a general rule, your URLs should be short, relevant, and easy to read. Using keywords in your URLs can also help improve your website’s ranking for those keywords. URL structure should be such that no important pages are more than 2-3 level deep in hierarchy.
6. Naming convention is important
The names you give to your website’s pages, files and folders can make a difference to your website’s search engine ranking. Using keywords in your file and folder names can help improve your website’s ranking for those keywords. Similarly, using keywords in your page titles and headings can also help improve your website’s ranking. Readable file names will also help with improving your click through rates and onsite user engagement.
7. Use HTML Heading correctly
HTML headings are used to structure the content on your website. They are also used by search engines to understand the hierarchy of your content. Using the correct heading level (H1, H2, H3, etc.) for your content is important for both the user experience and search engine optimization. Headings should be used to structure the content on your page, and not for decorative purposes.
8. Implement Schema Markup
Schema markup is a code that you can add to your website to help search engines understand your website’s content. As a web designer/developer, one must be familiar with schema.org and know how to implement it on websites. Adding schema markup to your website can help improve your website’s click-through rate and search engine ranking. There are certain type of markups that can apply to almost any website such as organization, web page, ratings, and more.
9. Use social media effectively
Social media is a powerful tool that can be used to promote your website and its content. Integrating social media into your website can help increase traffic to your website and improve your website’s search engine ranking. Adding social media buttons to your website will make it easier for users to share your content on their social media profiles. You can also use social media to build backlinks to your website.
10. Pay special attention to multimedia content accessibility
Infographics, pdfs, audio, video are all great tool to increase user engagement but getting multimedia content indexed is slightly more difficult that text. Search engines can’t read audio transcripts or video descriptions the same way as they can read text, so it’s important to provide them with additional information about your multimedia content. You can do this by adding transcripts, captions, and descriptions to your audio and video files. You can also use schema markup to provide additional information about your multimedia content.
Conclusion As a web designer/developer, it is important to be familiar with the latest SEO trends and best practices. The tips in this article will help you improve your website’s ranking and visibility in search engine results pages. Keep these tips in mind when designing or developing your next website.
