Open Letter to Web Designers: Please Make SEO Friendly Websites
After the incredible craze for a well-structured SEO strategy in today’s internet world, it’s surprising that there are still many web developers who completely overlook the idea of SEO when creating a website.
However, the simple fact of the matter is that if you want to increase your brand’s awareness and bring more traffic to your website, effective site optimization should be your top priority. Think of it as a well-constructed powerful machine that won’t work without a small but essential screw. That small screw is SEO – an integral part of your success.
SEO Friendly Websites
According to Sam McRoberts, a CEO of VUDU Marketing, search engine optimization is no longer viewed only as a marketing tactic, but as a branding play. It’s not a brainer that more and more people (between 80-90%) are checking reviews prior to any purchase, and the number is constantly on the increase.
So, do you want your business to go viral or not?
Take a look at some of the best practices how to make search engines crawl more easily and your web design more SEO friendly.
Create an effective URL structure
If you want people to swing up a visit and navigate your site with a breeze, you need to invest your time into creating a friendlier URL. Extremely long URLs will bounce the visitors of your site, especially if they are trying to memorize it or create a link to it. Keep in mind, URLs are displayed in search results below the document’s title and can, therefore, provide a search user with a valuable information on the page. Instead of making long and confusing URLs with fewer recognizable words, create an optimized consumer-pleasant URL structure that contains relevant keywords. This should help both the search engines and users get the clear layout of your page content. Google suggests using shorter ones with generic page names and excessive keywords as it will remove the ambiguity and make the content much clearer to the user.
https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
Use optimized keywords and a high-quality content
Ever since the beginning of an online search, marketers have been using the tactic of keyword search to increase customers’ exposure to the brand. Not only are you given the ability to incorporate keywords in any article and the design of your site, but you can also use them to optimize images. Make sure you find best keywords prior to the beginning of the SEO campaign. Google Keyword Planner, a handy tool that will make the search much more efficient, will help you with that.
No matter how effective keyword search is in manipulating search engines, “stuffing” keywords literally everywhere, from website slogans to URLs, can be detrimental to your business rather than critical. For example, if the targeted keyword is “Sydney Opera House” and the content you include doesn’t provide any relevant or natural information about it, but irrelevant content instead, then you will fail to rank for “Sydney Opera”. Use your keywords as naturally as possible and always know the topics your visitors will be looking for.
https://www.promotemyplace.com/blog/choosing-keywords-for-holiday-rental-website
Improve your site’s navigation
There is nothing more frustrating and intimidating for users than having to spend their precious time trying to find the desired content. If you want to avoid this kind of scenario, you need to develop a quick, simple and efficient navigation. The first thing you should be concerned about is how your potential visitors will go from your root page to other pages with more specific content.
While dropdown and flyout menus can be hard for both robots and people to handle, text links and easily manageable items can take a headache out of unnecessary searching for the right content. Also, you should consider creating breadcrumb lists – rows which include internal links at the top or bottom of the page and enable your visitors to quickly navigate and reach the section they want in a matter of a second.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/breadcrumbs-in-web-design-examples-and-best-practices/
Integrate social media into your website
Whether you like it or not, we have all more or less become dependent on social media which, consequently, has a major effect on many aspects of our lives. The fact that brands spend a huge amount of money to maintain their online social presence supports the idea that it has become very difficult to achieve business success without advertising the product on social platforms and attracting social media followers. Integrate social media into your web’s design and share your content across the web. Set up a social media sharing by integrating social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ into your website’s design. Promote sharing buttons at the bottom of each page so that visitors can share the content and increase the number of inbound links. This will undoubtedly increase your brand’s awareness and create a group of loyal customers with a unique source of customer intelligence.
http://blog.ourchurch.com/2013/10/21/12-ways-to-integrate-social-media-into-your-website/
Create an eye-catching meta description
Another part of search marketing that deserves much attention is a page’s description meta tag. Meta description includes the snippet of the text displayed beneath the listing in the results which gives the summary of what the page is about. Google will use these snippets depending on whether or not they match up with the user’s query. To achieve this, you need to create a readable, eye-catching description presented in a sentence or a short paragraph in bold types. To make sure you’ve crafted the contents that will increase your site’s search engine rank, make use of Google Webmaster Tools – a tool which provides you with a useful content analysis. Also, a compelling and effective meta description can simulate people to click through your site which has a major effect on the rankings.
Why is SEO so important?
The greatest thing about the SEO is its ability to give you global presence, make you more visible and, most importantly, help you reach more potential customers. Building a professional site with an amazing theme is a good starting point, but it’s not enough to reach your ultimate goal. SEO will help you discover what your user’s love or hate, deliver great user experience, and, eventually, discover your target audience. Also, SEO grabs more market share. Finally, be mindful that this invaluable tool is gaining popularity on daily basis and that even the most successful businesses invested in it. It’s important to keep up with fashions and improve your position. So, develop a winning SEO strategy, get yourself a top-ranked position and outmaneuver your leading competitors.
About the Author
Maja Mrsic is a professional content writer and editor at Active Collab. After finishing her Master’s Degree in English studies, she pursued a career in content and technical writing in digital marketing.
Source: SEO For Growth