Tuesday 27 May 2014

Success in Web Design

Difference between how a traditional web designer designs a website compared to an SEO person? One looks for beauty while the SEO web-designer looks for readability, findabilty and crawability. Website design is not only about the combination of different colors and font sizes. But it's also about the structure of navigation i.e. how you want to take your web visitor to reach goals.


SEO strategy is comprised of several processes, mainly at 3 different stages, that is:
1) Good website design
2) Seeking attention from different search engines and directories related to your business niche
3) Achieving long-term popularities on the Internet

"Simplicity is king when designing a website"! Sometimes too many internal links or unstructured navigation will make user think too hard and also end up misleading the search engines. Finding the right coordination between modern yet simple design, informative and engaging the user is the basic principle of success.

It's also important that you set off by setting goals and transition levels for each piece of your new web site. Calls to action should be defined and put in place for each section of content that answers your users' needs and wants. Points to be considered when you start designing:
  • Make sure your site reflects what users want when designing.
  • Make your product/services of the business more easy to navigate.
  • Be creative and build a modern, user-friendly look and feel.
Some points that make a clear understanding of how good web design directly affects the success of SEO:

1. When it comes to abandonment rates, responsive website design really help with SEO because if anyone visits a non-friendly mobile site in mobile device then it's much more likely they will abandon it. As search engine takes this into consideration when ranking a web page, site must be optimized for mobile.

2. Size of the website has great impact on search rankings. Therefore, Parallax design i.e. building your entire website on a single page, is not a good option until and unless if it's a company page or contest page in which you probably need to rank for two or three keywords.

3. Although your web designer has done the great job in designing a site, but that affects horribly with site optimization then you need to consider these things:

  • Code Bloat can hurt rankings if your site’s design integrates too much code, so keep your code lean and mean.
  • Try to adapt the SEO acceptable permalink structure rather than dynamic structures which don’t do well in search engines.
  • If possible, try to avoid JavaScript code as it cannot be crawled.

4. These days, popular choices have been using an infographics content in place of the normal graphics as they are more eye-catching and engage readers for more time. Make sure to use ALT tag or some text to help Google understand things as images can’t be crawled.

5. To impress visitors with amazing header could be a poisonous thing now, instead try to use Fold – what visitor initially sees first on any website.

6. Using breadcrumbs can be a life saver as it helps search engine in crawling the website. From a usability point, it also helps the user in navigating to the particular service page without hitting back button.

7. Internal linking not only increase usability experience for visitors, but it is also good for SEO as it reminds search engine that your old blogs and pages still holds the value.

At the end of the day, it works well if you’re not much flashy, have good content to be presented with proper HTML structure.

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