Crafting a website that stands out in the digital landscape involves a delicate dance between design aesthetics and search engine optimization (SEO). Whether you’re venturing into website creation solo or partnering with a web design agency, understanding the fundamental elements is paramount. It can help you stand out within the growing competition in today’s business landscape and build trust and credibility with your potential customers. Let’s explore how you can build a website that ranks.
1. The Fundamentals of a Well-Optimized Website
You can either build a website yourself or work with a web design agency to ensure the feel and look of your site meets your customer’s needs and complements your brand. The core elements of a well-optimized web design include:
- Domain: Your website should have a single (canonical) domain as it is the entry point into your website. The others, if any, should redirect to this domain.
- Domain name: The address individuals can enter to reach the website on the hosting service server.
- Hosting: This puts your business and brand on the Internet map. Opt for the best hosting in your budget that ensures your website runs well with good uptime.
- CMS, also known as a content management system, allows you to create and run a website without building one from scratch, such as Wix or WordPress.
2. Crawling and Accessibility
Your webpage’s crawlability refers to the ease with which search engines like Google will discover your page. Google finds web pages through the crawling process by using computer programs called bots, spiders, or web crawlers to follow links between pages to discover updated or new pages.
Similarly, a webpage’s indexability means search engines can add your page to their index after they analyze the page and its content. This means your site’s content should be text-based, sensibility-optimized, and well-written. Videos, PDFs, and images are crucial and contribute to search engine traffic, but they should be discoverable, organized, and well-named to be indexed. Internal links impact your website’s indexability and crawlability as they help bots find all your web pages.
3. Information Architecture
Information architecture, or IA, involves structuring, labeling, classifying, and organizing your digital content in a way that aids user navigation. It applies to blog posts, FAQs, articles, services, content, and locations. Another IA component is navigation, a system of menus and links that helps users move around the website. For good IA, you need the following:
- Clear and concise navigation
- Avoid jargon
- Use keywords in your navigation, content, and titles
- Organize your content in a logical way that makes sense to users.
- Take a content inventory, conduct an audit, and remove or edit outdated content or reorganize.
4. Mobile-Friendliness, Website Speed, and Sitemaps
Mobile users account for 59% of worldwide traffic, so having a responsive website with a seamless experience should also translate to mobile devices. Individuals are likely to leave a website that takes ages to load. These factors affect speed:
- File sizes
- Web hosting
- Traffic volume
- Coding/scripts
- Plugins
A sitemap is a file where all your files, videos, webpages, etc., are housed. It helps Google find and crawl all your websites to help with ranking and organic traffic.
5. Code, File Names, and Alt Tags
Web designers often use HTML and CSS codes, which is ideal. While flash sites look fantastic, they are difficult to optimize and should be avoided. Your images should have logical descriptive file names to help with crawlability. Try to keep your file size as small as possible, as large files also increase bounce rates and damage your ranking.
Alt tags on your images help search engines determine what is being depicted, and when users hover a mouse over an image, they can also read it. It also aids visually impaired users in understanding what is being shown.
Endnote
In the dynamic realm of online presence, incorporating SEO principles with web design is more than necessary; it’s a strategic advantage. Regularly revisit and refine your website’s elements to align with evolving SEO algorithms and user expectations. The journey to a well-ranked website is an ongoing process that demands adaptability, creativity, and a keen understanding of the ever-changing digital landscape.