Is Your Web Design Killing Your SEO?
If you’re looking into how to improve your organic SEO strategies, chances are you’ve heard everything from focusing more on content marketing to improving your social media outreach to taking a long-game approach to building quality links around the web. Without a doubt, using each one of those tools will, indeed, improve your website search optimization. However, web design, the oldest tool in the trade, remains one of the most important facets of any internet marketing strategy with an eye toward SEO.
How Does Website Design Affect Organic SEO Optimization?
As Search Engine Journal writes, each method of website design will have different effects on your SEO campaign. Responsive web design will likely improve your SEO outreach to mobile users, while Parallax design, stunning as it may be, can actually water down your ability to have your content cataloged and listed in search engine results. In other words, no matter what you do with your website design, it’s going to affect your SEO. Do your research on the different types before you decide to design your page. That being said, there are some universal tips custom web designers can use to improve the efficacy of your website’s SEO.
Three Tips Custom Web Designers Can Use to Improve SEO Internet Marketing
- The Back End Needs to Be Just as Pretty as the Front
- Tap into the Science of Colors
- Pepper Smart Keywords Throughout Your Code
As Web Design Ledger sagely points out, when you’re designing a page to improve your SEO, you need to make sure that the code looks just as pretty as the page your visitors will see, if not prettier. By keeping your code clean and easily scannable by Google’s robots, you greatly increase the amount of content that will be cataloged and listed in the SERPs. That, as you know, translates into a greater likelihood of being found.
Too many marketers assume that SEO success is all about content, keywords, and coding, when, in fact, the reality is that design SEO goes far beyond these static concepts. As Search Engine Land writes, the colors you choose on your website will affect not only how your visitors feel about your company, but, perhaps more important for SEO, how cataloging robots will index your page. Do your links clearly look clickable? Is it difficult to read your content against a background that too closely matches or doesn’t match nearly enough? All of these things will affect your SEO.
Although SEO has largely moved to focus on content optimization, keywording still plays a vital role in attracting the attention of search engines and their users. When you’re coding your webpage, be sure to pepper relevant keywords throughout. Note, however, that “pepper” is the operative word here; the last thing you need is to be penalized because you spam keywords in your back end.
Are you a custom web designer? What SEO design tips would you give to others who are still learning the ropes? Sound off in the comment section below. Read more: paraduxmedia.com