Simply creating a beautiful website design won’t be enough to have your site ranking highly in search engines. You will need to incorporate various SEO elements that will give your business the best chance of being placed in front of your target audience.
Whether you are designing your website for the first time or looking for a revamp, following our top five SEO tips when designing a website will help you to climb Google rankings and increase visitor numbers to your site.
1. Use Title and Alt-Tags Appropriately
When designing your website, make sure to include title tags throughout each page to present hierarchy and structure. H1 tags should include the keyword you are looking to rank for on that page, and will help you rank higher for that specific search query as Google will be able to understand the contents of that page easily.
Your title tag needs to be clear and engaging to both Google and humans, along with a relevant meta description that will get people wanting to click on your page in the SERP. If your title is long and dreary rather than short and powerful, Google will struggle to crawl your website and potential visitors may end up scrolling towards your competitors.
2. Ensure Your Website Design Is Responsive
Google will measure your website’s ranking depending on how user-friendly your site is. This is in relation to ease of navigation, site loading speed, mobile-friendliness and structure. When designing a website all of this needs to be in mind, by making sure files are optimised for quick responses, the design is responsive across multiple devices and there are clear menus and internal linking to find your way through the site. If your website is cluttered, difficult to follow and takes a long time to load then Google will not see it as worthy to rank highly.
3. Include Graphics & Videos
Including graphics and videos in your website design will help to create a positive user-experience, and increase accessibility for visitors that understand information more easily through visuals. The addition of this will also enhance the aesthetics of the website design, creating a more user-friendly website whereby other websites are also more likely to link to. This is called a backlink, which is incredibly important to increase the domain authority of sites that have a huge impact on your ranking position.
4. Conduct Keyword Research
When including copy on your website pages, it is important to conduct keyword research beforehand so that pages have specific search queries that the copy is optimised to rank for. Marketing agencies such as this SEO agency in Bristol are able to research this data for you; providing what your target audience are searching for, the volume of searches per month, the difficulty to rank for it and even what your competitors are ranking for. They are then able to write highly engaging copy or blog posts that are fully optimised, increasing your chances of ranking in high positions in the SERP.
5. Add & Refresh Content Regularly
Google recognised websites that are continuously adding new content and updating old posts. This shows that you are active, value your visitors and are providing engaging updated content to Google. Link building will also be increased through the addition of regular content, showing that your content is backed by multiple sources. The best way to do this is through the addition of a blog page, where you can add regular blog posts on a variety of topics whether that be industry news, top tips, how-to articles or case studies that can convert visitors into customers.
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