New Age of SEO
However, the days of indexing of web pages for the internet are long gone. With upgrading of Google algorithms every other day, search engine optimization (SEO) has become the only way to make money online.
In essence, your website must rank highly to draw more traffic leading to sales conversion and a higher ROI. However, there is a problem here; while most SEO experts concentrate on techniques to get your website on the first page of Google, they forget that the main problem could be somewhere else.
The Elephant in the Room; Web Design
If you have been struggling to get traffic to your websitedespite heavy investment in SEO, there is a high likelihood that the problem is in your website's design. This situation has instigated a dirty war between web designers on one-hand and SEO gurus on the other.
Web designers claim that SEOs are just after manipulating ranking by hook or crook which to a large extent is true. On the other hand, SEO masters throw salvos back claiming web designers have no idea about SEO and their poor coding makes life hard in optimizing clients' websites for search engines.
A Meeting Point for SEO and Web Design
Clearly, these battles do not help your business websiteand you will continue losing traffic as these two professions battle. The surprising thing is that with a good web designer, you can get SEO integrated right from the beginning.
In essence, a marriage between SEO and web design is possible and it nullifies all these tirades. Remember that a fancy website is not what you want but you want a great website that is user friendly. This is what synergy of these two aspects brings to the table.
A Web designer's SEO Checklist
So, how can your web designer amalgamate these two at the initial stages? Here is a look:
· Site-Wide SEO Consideration: Considerations here include accessibility highlighting pagination, 404 errors, and site speed among other issues. Other factors to check include URL structure, which highlights domain extensions, URL parameters among other areas. Finally, the designer checks sitemaps including video, HTML, XML, and image sitemaps.
· On- page SEO: To help optimize a page for Google, a web designer works on keywords including researching, their use in titles, in headings, and in content. The content is also a highlight in on-page SEO with focus being on length, type, search engine's ability to crawl it, freshness among other factors. Images, social media snippets, and local search are also considered.
· Off-Page SEO: Focus here shifts to bad links, diversity no follow links, anchor texts and authority of links to ensure they add value to your website.
Why Integrate WEB Design and SEO?
Your business is all about efficiency and the bottom-line. When you fuse SEO into web design, you save money that would have been used in future SEO campaigns.
What's more your businesses websiteis already optimized immediately it is indexed meaning more clients from the initial stages. You will then be able to grow your customer base from here leading to high ROI. So, make sure you tell your professional web designer what you want from the start.