To create a successful website the design is highly important in order to achieve the primary goals of the site; commonly being to communicate brand awareness, target their specific market, increase sales or enquires and lastly to give the company an online identity. However, for successful web design to be able to fulfil all of these goals there needs to be something else added into the mix, this being SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Many web designers forget about the importance of creating a site that is not only designed well but is also able to have the best chance of being found in the search engines. With the internet advancing all the time, web design must keep up with the new demands. One of the biggest demands is having a site that performs well in terms of search engine rankings to make sure that it is received by its audience.
So how can web designers create searchable designs? With a few easy and often underestimated tricks, a website can have a much greater chance of being found online. Here are a few tips that web designers should take into consideration while designing a site:
Headers – Headers of pages should always be text. Many designers use images for headers which does not allow search engine to read the text making it detrimental to the sites rankings. These text headers should be bold and descriptive.
Title tags - Often it can be seen that a title tag of a web page includes the company name and thats about it. But in order for search engines to know what the page is about, these title tags should be optimised to include keywords that describe what the page is about. They should also try to create a call to action.
Description Meta tags - Like the title tags, this too should be a detailed description of the content of the page , including keywords to accurately describe it.
Alt tags - These tags describe images that are on web pages and should be used to include descriptive keywords that keep in line with what the page is about, to amplify its meaning and therefore look more authoritative to the search engines.
Content - When designing sites, content is one of the elements that if lacking, then the ‘searchablility’ of the site really suffers. Search engines like to see lots of keyword rich unique content to make the site look informative and useful, so when designing a site, make sure you include content, content, content.
Creating Call to Action - The design of the website should be able to create a clear call to action in order to achieve the aims of the site, whether it is to sell products or services, or to promote them. Either way, website design should be able a successful create this call to action.
Usability - Web design is all about usability so it’s no surprise that its getting a mention here. Usability is something that is important to make the site easy to use, creating a pleasant user experience that will encourage people to use the site and help with its online success.
Make it social - These days it’s important to give a site a social aspect. By including the company’s social networks on its website it boosts their online identity and makes it much easier to create a buzz, promote and increase awareness of the brand.
Analytics - Adding Google Analytics onto a site is not only easy, simple pasting in code supplyed by Google, but iot also allows you to see how the site is performing, such as the amount of traffic to the site, what keywords the site is being found for, making it easy to see what the sites disadvantages are and improving on them.
All of these tips may not be suitable for every site but they should be considered when designing a site to ensure that your design is not only seen and used by the company and its current customers, but seen by new and potential online customers too. Getting these SEO tips right in the first instance, at the design stage, overall ensures the site more online success.
