Crucial Tips To Know About Web Design and SEO
by wmcuser
Web design and SEO are partners in crime when it comes to creating web pages today. A pretty face can only get your website and in effect, your brand so far in bustling, highly-competitive Vancouver. It’s important to know how web design and SEO work together to create visually appealing and effective websites for improved user experience and higher conversion rates.
Here’s a collection of tips for improving both your site’s SEO and web design to deliver an optimal user and customer experience:
Smart and Responsive Design
It is important that your site is both visually appealing and responsive. Responsive design means you website is functional on multiple devices. From an SEO perspective, this means having a single URL for both the mobile and main site. This is an easy way to increase your external backlink count by driving all links to a single URL.
For Google, having a responsive website that performs well especially on mobile devices – easily the most widely-used medium these days – signals an optimal user experience, since users are easily able to find what they need on your site, without having to repeatedly pinch and zoom the screen to find the information they need. When this happens, they’re likely to bounce back to search results. Having users stay on-site and in effect, a low bounce rate signals to Google that your site is responsive not just for users’ mobile devices, but to their queries as well, which contributes to improved rankings.
Clear URL Organization
Ambiguous URLs do not work well with search engines. Aim to create clear and logical URLs. For example, if you’re looking for graphic design in Vancouver, a URL like: www.domain.com/graphic-design-Vancouver will rate higher than something like: www.domain.com/post/id4329304
Speed Matters
A slow website can not only cause you to lose customers, but it can also cause you to lose valuable web traffic. On average, mobile users will wait five seconds for a page to load and desktop users will wait only three seconds. Make sure your page is running smoothly by minimizing JavaScripts, enabling compression, using good quality images with smaller file sizes, and browser caching.
Be Careful With JavaScripts
While JavaScript can be useful in creating visually appealing websites, it should be used only be used partially. Search engines work by crawling through websites to index them and excessive use of JavaScripts will cause crawling issues. Other issues when designing with JavaScript include slow page load time and difficult mobile displays – both pitfalls that could cause bounce rate to increase, easily jeopardizing your SEO strategy to rank well on search.
Code Cleaning
Search engines have a hard time recognizing your page if there is too much code on it. Although everything may look fine on the surface, bloated code can cause search engines to detect something amiss making it difficult for crawlers to recognize your page, flagging it as an issue, which can result in your site not being recommended as search result, as it appears not to deliver an optimal user experience.
Limited Use Of Flash
A lot of devices and search engines do not respond well to flash, so it’s advisable to avoid it completely if at all possible when designing an SEO friendly webpage. However, if you are using flash, don’t use it for the entire website. Specifically, make sure not to use flash on important pieces of your website such as navigation and text.
Make Navigation Easy For Everyone
It is crucial to ensure your pages are easy for both customers and search engines to navigate. Menus must be helpful and functional, and you must link your pages together properly. If users can’t find what they need, they will navigate away from your site and possibly bounce back to search results, triggering an increase in bounce rate.
Creating a sitemap can assist with creating easy navigation and better search engine visibility. A sitemap also lets crawlers know immediately about any changes to your website so that the page is indexed faster, allowing you to serve up fresh and up-to-date information to your potential customers in Vancouver.
Web design and SEO work in tandem to create an enticing website for customers. Our web design and SEO experts in Vancouver will optimize your website for higher conversion rates! Contact us today at (604) 782-6467.
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