Why You Need SEO Friendly Website Design

Connectica • October 30, 2015 • Design SEO

website design

Read Time: 3 minutes

Website Design that Works for SEO

In today’s competitive online market, website design needs to make an impact: the landing page should capture the user’s attention, and encourage them to spend more time engaging with your site (potentially resulting in a sale). You may think this means an eye-catching website, but web design isn’t just about having a ‘pretty face’ for your site. Even a dazzling website can’t make up for subpar content. When revamping your company’s webpage, it’s vital to remember the relationship between attractive design and the content. So let’s look at some tips for creating SEO-friendly web design.

Keep It Simple
One of the biggest issues with website design is trying to cram too many things onto one page. Not only is this visually chaotic and confusing, but it can actually prevent the user from exploring your site. There’s no point in directing potential customers to a website they can’t navigate! Instead of lots of links, banners, and pop-ups that fragment the user’s attention, stick to a few important links that guide the customer through the pages you want them to see.

One solution is parallax web design. This may sound like something from a sci-fi film, but it’s actually a very simple and increasingly popular design method. As the user scrolls down the webpage, the various important elements of the webpage will move or pop up, creating a dynamic website experience. The user can then click on relevant links that interest them, redirecting them to the next page. Even our home webpage makes use of some parallax design. Whilst this method can be overwhelming when executed poorly, parallax design can be very effective when it’s simple, straightforward and minimalist.

Word and Image
Even with a simple and elegant design, however, things can go wrong. SEO works best when your content is strong, is relevant to popular keyword searches, and makes it easy for search engines to crawl your webpage. But this doesn’t mean cramming your copy full of keywords. Web design can bolster the optimization of your content by placing important information in the right place, or creating a relationship between images and text. For example, if all the link buttons on your site are images, search engines are going to overlook these elements and struggle to crawl your site. You can resolve this problem by using a mouse hover for image links: as the cursor moves over the image, text pops up or becomes visible. This is an effective technique that allows images to incorporate text, and makes the site search engine friendly.

Another way to make the most of your design elements is to keep images at a reasonable size. By optimizing the file size of images, your webpage will load quickly. Slow loading times hinder your search engine ranking – not to mention annoy your potential customers!

Make It Accessible
Browsing the internet is no longer a stay-at-home affair. A recent study from the Pew Research Centre shows that 64% of American adults have a smartphone of some kind. And with a growing number of people using their phones, tablets, and other devices to access the internet, web design needs to be accessible to multiple platforms.

This is where responsive design comes in: depending on the device used to access the site, the website’s pages can adapt and format themselves to suit the platform. This means that you don’t need separate URLs for your desktop site and your mobile site – improving the efficiency and impact of your SEO.

Still not sure what all this means? Contact Connectica for more information about SEO-friendly web design.

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