The visual appeal of any website holds a lot of importance but isn’t the only criteria for its success. No matter how cool your website looks, it’s a complete waste if no one knows that it even exists. That’s when SEO comes into play. Search Engine Optimization helps in driving more and more customers towards a website thereby increasing the chances of conversion. That said, it’s important for website designers to keep SEO at the back of their head while designing a website in order to increase its effectiveness. In this article, we will learn 7 interesting tips to create an impressive SEO friendly website design.

1. Integrate Social Media

Search engines give a lot of importance to Social Media. Websites with social media elements enjoy higher search engine rankings which lead to more traffic on the website and eventually boosts the conversion. So, include social media icons of all your social media accounts on your website. Besides, don’t restrict yourself to Facebook and Twitter only. A lot of other social media platforms like Snapchat, Youtube, Instagram, Flickr etc. are gaining popularity these days and must not be left out. This helps in creating a personable image of your brand in front of visitors.

2. Optimize The Images On Your Website

It’s not enough to optimize the text of your website to make it user-friendly. The same level of optimization must be done for the images as well. Ensure that the images you use are of good quality but small in size. Ideally, images must be between 30kb to 100kb and have a resolution of 72dpi. Large images will increase the page load time of your website which can hamper your search rankings. While selecting an alternative text for your images, ensure that you use relevant keywords. Furthermore, in order to enhance your search rankings, it’s best to use only relevant images and place them appropriately on the website.

Image Source: SEO Rave

3. Create SEO Friendly URLs For Your Web Pages

A complicated web page URL can adversely affect your search engine rankings. For Example – http://www.myfashion.com/products/item2?=6541 is not an SEO friendly URL as it doesn’t help the search engine to understand what this page is about. Instead, http://www.myfashion.com/Men/Shoes/Casual is way better as it clearly explains the details about the page. That said, avoid using too many categories. Another best practice is to use a hyphen instead of an underscore to separate words in the URL.

4. The Web Design Must Be Responsive

Your website design must be responsive and must be accessible from all the devices and across browsers. If visitors are not able to access the website from any particular medium, they are forced to bounce off and might not ever return back to your website. Also, the page loading time goes hand in hand with the accessibility factor. Eliminate any design elements that may cause the web pages to load slowly as it will hamper the search rankings directly.

5. Don’t Overuse Javascript

It’s a common mistake done by web developers and designers to use Javascript in the entire site design. Search engines crawl through the website to index them and rank them accordingly. They will struggle to crawl through your website if your site heavily uses Javascript. Moreover, Javascript doesn’t perform very well especially in cases of mobile devices. Stay away from excessive use of Javascript and use it sparingly on your website to make your web design more user-friendly as well as SEO friendly.

6. Incorporate Keywords In The Entire Design

If you think that keywords can only be used in the copy of your website, then you’re sadly mistaken. Keywords can be easily incorporated into the entire website design. As mentioned earlier, keywords can be used as alternative text for images. Moreover, they can be used at many other places like in the title tag, H1 tags, website slogans, meta descriptions, meta keywords, navigation, H2 tags, bullet points, title attribute on links, H3 tags, breadcrumb trails, footer links, URL’s, file names, internal links and folder names.

7. Use A Sitemap

The sitemap becomes very critical for a website especially when you have a dynamic site or a site with thousands or lakhs of pages. All the content heavy websites with a large number of pages and dynamic sites face a lot of difficulties while being crawled by search engines. To overcome this problem XML sitemap is used. XML sitemap ensures that a website is crawled easily by search engines, even if there are a lot of content-heavy pages in it.

Designing a website not merely playing around with different layouts, themes and color schemes. It’s way more complex than that. It’s very important for designers to understand each and every element of web designing in order to create a successful web design. Talk to our design experts and discuss more about effective website designing.

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