SEO is integral to businesses operating online, but very few realise that search engine optimisation must be built into the website design process. SEO should not be an afterthought and added later when the website is ready. After all, your website is going to be the centre of your digital marketing world.
Here, Nhance Digital’s team of website designers and SEO specialists have outlined the important things that you need to know when developing an SEO-friendly website.
The core elements for a well-optimised design process
Domains
You need to come up with a domain name for your business that will let your users know what you are offering. The domain name should make sense and all your subdomains should also point to your main website.
Hosting
Hosting is important and if you do not follow the rules, you might end up with a slow website. When it comes to hosting, you need to be situated where your target audience is situated. Also, be platform-specific.
CMS
The content management system or CMS that you choose for your website can majorly influence your success. WordPress is a good option, but it is not the only one. You can talk to our website developers to know which CMS is right for you.
Mobile-friendly website design
Most people use their mobile devices today to conduct Internet searches. Even Google acknowledges this shift and the search giant has introduced the mobile-first index. So, when you are designing your website to impress the search engines, you must give importance to mobile-friendliness. We recommend opting for a responsive website design so that your webpages can easily adapt according to the different screen sizes.
From an SEO perspective, mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor for mobile search.
Page speed
In the mobile era, speed is another major consideration. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, your target audience will become impatient and they might even bounce to the website of your competitor. If you are unsure of the loading speed of your webpages, you can reach out to our SEO specialists. We can conduct a page speed test and even offer quick fixes.
Navigation
The navigation of your website is equally important. If you have a well-structured website, the navigation is going to work with the URLs, the structure and other components, such as XML sitemaps to solidify what each piece of content or webpage is about.
Navigation is not just a design element that is found at the top of the website. It is how you can encourage users to explore the most important parts of your website. You can use navigation as a tool to raise awareness of the additional services that you are offering.
Furthermore, make sure that navigation is kept simple. Website visitors should not have to think too much, but they should be able to follow the signs and links to find what they are looking for.
Well-optimised website content
When you are crafting website content, you need to keep the language simple and make sure to explain what you do. Users should not feel confused after reading the content on your website. Also, keyword research is important and should be done before you start writing the content. Keywords will help users to find what they are looking for without having to go through the entire website.
Also, the content must be well-structured. There should be proper title tags, meta tags and descriptions. Use headings and sub-headings properly so that it captures the idea and essence of the content. This not only helps users to browse through and get an idea of what your webpage is about, but helps search engine crawlers when they are crawling your webpages for indexing purposes.
So, these are a few things that you need to keep in mind when designing a website. There are also other factors to consider, such as the internal link structure, the URL structure, optimisation of images and so on. If you want detailed information on what the website design process entails, you can speak to Nhance Digital’s team of website designers and developers. We are a web design company in London with over 10 years’ experience and work with SEO specialists to create well-optimised websites. Talk to us, today!
