A Beginner’s Guide to SEO For Web Designers

Web Designers: Everyone knows that SEO is a vital step towards increasing the amount of traffic on your site. Optimizing your web designers to make sure it shows up on the first (or, worst case, second) page of the search engine results means that more people will click on your site and potentially purchase whatever you’re offering them.

Many people assume that SEO is something you insert into your site later on down the line, i.e., when you’re writing content or creating blogs. Sure, that’s part of the deal, but if you don’t think about SEO at the time of designing and building your site, you’re missing out on a tremendous amount of visitor potential.

Web designers need to know about SEO just as much as copywriters and bloggers, but the whole subject can seem like a mountain to climb when reading about it. Thankfully, SEO isn’t as hard as it seems to be – you need to know the basics and build from there.

Let’s check out a few points you need to remember when designing a new site about SEO.

Mobile-Friendly Optimization and SEO

Many people will visit your site from a phone or a tablet; not everyone uses laptops or a desktop computer these days. If your site is optimized for mobile use, you’re missing out big time. However, you need to bear in mind mobile SEO too.

It means ensuring that your mobile site has just as much information and available content as a website build to be viewed on a desktop. By doing this, and inserting those all-important keywords into your mobile content, you’ll find that your site ranks higher on the search results than it would otherwise do.

Also Read: 6 Tips How to Improve Your Web Design

Ensure Headlines and URLs are SEO’d

It’s not just content that needs to optimize, but the actual URL and headlines, too—these need to include those first keywords naturally and appropriately. It would help if you similarly had your keywords in anything relate to navigation across your site, as this makes it far more likely that your website will be picked up on a search engine crawl and therefore featured higher up.

The title of the page should include a keyword and tell the visitor what the page. Any keywords need to appear naturally and not stand out like a sore thumb, which is also the case for keywords used multiple times throughout the content body. Besides, ensure the lead keyword features somewhere in the URL, but not to make the URL too long as that can be detrimental in itself.

Check The Site Speed

Part of designing a high-quality site means making sure that it’s fast. Visitors will not wait around for content to appear on their screen, and the general timescale is nothing more than 2.5 seconds after clicking. The quicker, the better.

A slow site will easily flag up on a technical SEO audit report. So, make sure that you cut out excess pages, tidy up any plugins that might be slowing your site down, and look at compressing the size of high-resolution images.

Don’t Forget Meta Tags And Alt Tags.

R11 Solutions – Montreal web design company says that two areas are ideal for adding in keywords, but many people fail to do so. Meta descriptions should have your lead keyword featured, and every image should have an ALT tag, which also features a keyword. It gives the search engine more to search for and therefore increases the chances of your site being a feature.

Don’t make your meta descriptions longer than 150 characters, and ensure that your ALT tags are as small as possible, while still receiving the point across.

Never Underestimate the Power of SEO

Failing to take every legitimate opportunity to optimize a site for SEO is a huge mistake. There are many ways you can add keywords to your content at the designing stage, and it doesn’t always come down to blogs, product descriptions, and general content.

Designing your site with one eye on SEO means that you’re not missing out on significant opportunities and that your website is far more likely to rank higher when someone searches for those all-important keywords.

Of course, it also means that when you’re researching keywords, you need to put time and effort into choosing the right ones. The precise you are with this, the improved chance you have of increasing your site traffic. Using a ‘hit and hope’ approach will yield poor results and ensure that your site performs well under its potential. That means you’re losing out on potential profits and that visitors are more likely to go to your competitors than you.