When building a website for your business make sure not to forget these SEO design elements.
There are many things that go into the design of a good website. There is site structure, appearance, navigation and a host of other things to consider. A great website design is about more than aesthetics. Yes, it needs to be inviting and pleasing to look at, but it also needs to be easy to navigate. Even if it is all these things, it won’t matter one little bit if you don’t take the time to incorporate some SEO design elements into it. Think of it like a vehicle that is going to get you from start-up to success. Your web design is the engine under the hood. If the car isn’t running well, you’ll get nowhere fast. You must fine tune everything from the spark plugs to the air filter and more to keep your vehicle running in tip-top shape. A website design has just as many elements to consider. It must be built for optimal performance. So, without further ado here is a list of SEO design elements to consider when building your website.
Consider Site Structure And Sub-Layers
It doesn’t seem like this would be a huge SEO element, but it is. If your site isn’t designed logically, then the Google-bots will have trouble crawling it. They don’t want to decipher your website anymore than your visitors do. The best thing to do is to organize things like a pyramid. Your homepage should state your one main purpose. It should contain your main keyword and be an all-encompassing umbrella under which all the other pages fall. Each subsequent page should be a sub-layer of the first. Research indicates that the best sites go no further than three to four layers deep. It is best to keep it around there for optimal performance. There are many images of a good site structure available, take a look at a few before you get too far into it. Besides, a good site structure will make your site much easier for your visitors to navigate thereby increasing conversions.
Structure Your Site’s Navigation
Since you are thinking about site structure and people navigating your site, here are a few other tips. First, ensure that your site is easy to navigate for someone who has never seen it before. Display a site menu prominently at the top of the homepage or even along a sidebar as long as it is easy to find. You’ll want to ensure that visitors, and Google, can find every page on your site and you have no orphaned pages. Orphaned pages are pages that aren’t linked to any other pages on your site. Visitors need to be able to find pages by following links. Remember, this is how Google looks for pages, too, so it is more important than you may think.
Don’t Leave Out Your URL Structure
This is another element people don’t always realize is closely connected with SEO. It is important to keep URLs short and try to incorporate your main keyword if at all possible. Besides, shorter URLs are more memorable to your visitors. Avoid abbreviations and confusing letter or number strings. Try to ensure your URL clearly describes your page content so visitors know what to expect. When dealing with sub-pages, use hyphens instead of wordy letter strings that visitors need to decipher.
Be Mobile-First
Mobile-friendly is long gone and the internet is now mobile-first. Keep this is mind. You want to ensure that you are using a responsive template that will display well across all screen sizes. Over half of all queries are performed from a mobile device and you don’t want to miss out on that traffic because of a design flaw.
A successful website will have great content, good flow and aesthetics, and great SEO. Following the information provided here, you should easily be able to focus on the SEO design elements that matter most. Remember, search engines are simply computer algorithms that determine what you’ve done to get where you are. If you’ve focus your SEO on these three elements, made sure you content is top-notch, and your website is easy on the eyes, then you shouldn’t have any trouble getting ranked.