So, ready to build or upgrade your website? Well, this is a mighty positive step you are taking. But, do you know what are the things you need to keep in your mind to design a website that yields long-term results? SEO. SEO is way more than just ranking a website on the Google search engine. Yes, SEO plays a vital role in website design too. The more you take care of SEO, the more SEO takes care of your website.
How Does SEO impact website design?
Okay, let’s assume, you make your website live. But poor SEO makes your website difficult to be found on search engines. You may be wondering how even without starting SEO, your SEO is poor? This happens when you decide to go with a WordPress theme which is poorly coded and less SEO-friendly. So, do you think your website will work for you? Unfortunately, No.
To let your website achieve success for you, you need to not only go with an attractive design but also efficient and SEO-friendly coding, and most importantly, essential plugins. Remember, your website will invite a large amount of traffic only if you take care of both, looks and search engine friendliness.
No matter what value your website provides in terms of content, but things like poor design, more loading time (speed), lack of mobile friendliness nullifies the positive effects of good content. Thus, you need to get it clear that SEO is your key to a successful website design.
So now, what next? How do you ensure your website doesn’t lack at least due to poor SEO? What factors should be considering while designing a website? Let’s address these questions below:
1. Domain Name: Search Engines consider numerous factors while deriving the quality of a Domain Name. And Domain Name plays a vital role in the SEO of a website which makes it important for you to choose the same keeping several factors in your mind.
Choosing the right domain name is your first steps towards the success of your online presence. Try choosing a short domain name. The short domain name is easy to remember and creates a positive psychological impact on the reader’s mind. Avoid selecting and purchasing a complicated domain name. Complicated domain name is difficult to remember, and chances of reader’s re-visit are meagre if your website is not ranked.
Try purchasing the domain name which incorporates your keyword. Your domain name should define your brand. It should clearly define what services you offer. Avoid dashes & misspellings in your domain name. . Misspellings make your website sound like spam.
2. Choosing WordPress Theme: Whenever you head on to choose the WordPress theme, you need to keep certain things in your mind. Do use the theme which exactly defines your business. Ensure mobile responsiveness of the theme. Avoid using a theme that looks attractive but comes with a minimal set of features. These themes are never recommended in a long run.
Don’t hesitate to buy a premium version of the theme if you feel, it will meet your requirements. Test the theme with various aspects before buying a premium version. Remember, the theme you pick will decide the looks of your website. So, you have to be careful, a good analyzer, and a bit creative while picking a theme for your website. If you are wondering what the best WordPress themes are to go with, just read our article on top 10 WordPress themes to use.
3. Website Loading Speed: Now, this is the most important SEO factor you need to keep in your mind. A slow website will never yield the desired results for you. A slow website ultimately turns off a user. And, chances are high, he won’t return to your website again.
So, what must be the loading time of my website? Google suggests a loading time of under 2 seconds. If your website does, you are on the right track. If not, then you need to ponder over the ways to do it. You can read our article on how to increase the website loading speed and overcome the loopholes.
4. Responsive Layout: It is a no-brainer that most users will visit your website from a mobile phone. Thus, you can’t just focus on desktop usage. You have to keep a trio of desktop, mobile, and tablets in your mind.
Even if your website lags in any of these devices, your authenticity degrades to a great extent. If you are using WordPress to design your website, ensure you test your website display on all devices.
5. Content Planning: Structuring your content is another SEO factor playing a considerable role in the success of your website design. Unstructured content eventually sounds terrible and turns off the user within no time.
Prepare a draft of your content and give a considerable amount of time to structure & break down your services/products into categories. For e.g., if you are a divorce lawyer, you can create separate pages for child support, child visitation, spousal support etc. Ensure you structure your content according to the search traffic.
6. Highlight Yourself: To earn the trust of the visitors, highlight yourself in a way that it doesn’t work as a source of distraction for the readers. Don’t hesitate to showcase your accreditations, work samples, photos, reviews, etc. It will give the visitor a strong reason to trust you and thus go with your service.
Give the links to your social media profile to give the visitor a belief that you are easily reachable. The easier to reach and prompt you are, the more users are likely to trust your services.
7. Website Customization: When it comes to website customization, users often tend to think of using much more than needed and end up creating a mess. While website customization is all about keeping the website simple, less distracting, and at the same time beautiful.
The more unnecessary things you use, the more it distracts a reader. Thus, avoid using the things which your website doesn’t require at all. Don’t miss out on some basic things like a breadcrumb, table of content, and buttons whenever needed. When you avoid distractions on the website, at the same time, you have to provide the readers everything they will require. A single thing you miss out on, and your website customization will be a mess. Remember, whenever you customize your website, logic and creativity must go together.
8. Navigation: If you desire to make it easy for the users to reach out to your website with ease, good navigation is a must. Remember, for users, you are not the only option, but you are one of several options. Thus, you need to provide the user comfort and value.
If the navigation of your website is poor, or if it disinterests the user, he will not think even for a moment before your leaving your website and finding a website that satisfies his requirements. An efficient Navigation plays a vital role in both, inviting traffic, and making Google search crawlers believe that your website is SEO friendly.
9. Linking: If you are looking for a way to boost the credibility, and authority of your website (and, of course, you are.), there is no better way than giving relevant links. There are two classes of linking: Internal & External.
Internal linking is when you link a word or a phrase to a page on your own website. Internal links not only help users to navigate on your website but also help search engines discover content on your website. Thus, internal links play an important role when it comes to the website rankings.
If you link a word or a phrase to another website, it is termed as external linking. With an external link, you need to keep in mind a couple of things. First, give external links only to the authorized sources. E.g., Wikipedia. Second, ensure every external link of your website is no-follow to avoid loosing your link juice. An efficient link building strategy is extremely important to get success in SEO.
10. Clear Call to Action (CTA): A Call to Action (CTA) prompts the user to take a specific action. It might be enrolling somewhere, or subscribing to your channel, or even purchasing something, the CTA you give must be very clear, and crisp. Usually, the CTA is a closing statement in a blog or an article or at the top of your website
Keep your CTA short. Recommended length is 5 to 7 words. State the benefit of taking the further action. Be precise and meticulous with the text you use.
Finally, SEO matters! Whether for ranking a website on Google, or to get long-term results, an SEO-friendly website design is a must. And, if you succeed in executing the above points with perfection, it’s just a matter of time before you get results. And, if you want to design an SEO-friendly website but not sure about the way to do it, contact Pat’s Marketing, SEO Consultant in Toronto at 888-488-7287 (toll-free).
