As a small business owner getting ready to build your first website, or redesign your existing one, you should be considering ways to make your web design search engine friendly. After all, what is the point of devoting countless hours and resources into creating a website, only for no one to be able to find it?
If you truly want to reap the benefits of having an online presence, then designing a website with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind is a necessity. SEO is a method used to improve the organic visibility of a website in search engines, resulting in increased traffic, and sales. According to the Search Engine Journal, 70-80% of users ignore paid ads when using search engines and 75% never scroll past the first page of search results [1].
There are a lot of things to take into account, but here are three key things that you should know about SEO-friendly web design:
Avoid Splash Pages
Many organizations make the mistake of putting up a big banner image and a link that says something along the lines of “Click here to enter” on their homepage. This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise you’re making a huge mistake, as your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page. Using a splash page will cause search engines to retrieve and index data from the splash page (which usually contains little to no content), instead of your actual website.
Important Information needs to be in Text
Another common mistake that many organizations make on their website is including important information in images, rather than text. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a thousand words will do more for your website SEO. While search engine crawlers are able to process different types of media, text has always been the best option for SEO as some search engine crawlers, such as Google’s, are unable to recognize text contained in images. Your goal should be to include text on every page of your website. If you post videos or audio, include a text-based transcription on the same page.
You must optimize your images
When you do use images, you can optimize them with text for better search visibility. One way to do this is to rename your image’s filename to include specific keywords. For example, instead of uploading a picture on a computer repair service page as Image01.jpg, rename it to something more specific, such as computer-repair-services.jpg. This puts your page’s main keywords in the filename of the image. Alternatively, you can accompany your images with a caption that explains what the picture is and why it is relevant to the page.
Making sure your website SEO is friendly will also result in it being friendly for your visitors. From the design all the way to the functionality you should make sure it is friendly for everyone including search engines and visitors. For more information, or Web Design Services.
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