Maintaining relevance with your product market is one of the biggest challenges e-commerce businesses face today. Since Google moderates this relevance, it has become crucial to identify which niche your business belongs to so search engines such as Google can channel the appropriate searcher to your web pages. While many SEO practices can help online merchants increase their relevance and improve their SEO score, without proper web design optimization it remains incomplete. In this article, we take the opportunity of revealing 9 web design tips that can help you boost your on-page SEO, without compromising your style or creativity.
Maintaining relevance with your product market is one of the biggest challenges e-commerce businesses face today. Since Google moderates this relevance, it has become crucial to identify which niche your business belongs to so search engines such as Google can channel the appropriate searcher to your web pages. While many SEO practices can help online merchants increase their relevance and improve their SEO score, without proper web design optimization it remains incomplete. In this article, we take the opportunity of revealing 9 web design tips that can help you boost your on-page SEO, without compromising your style or creativity.
1. Adding a Blog
Getting ranked without creating a blog on your website is about impossible nowadays. Search engines are always on the lookout for fresh, trending content to keep audiences supplied with new topics and informative write-ups. Moreover, by creating a blog section, you start complementing your onsite SEO through internal linking. You can create a weekly or monthly content calendar and post resourceful articles on trending topics about your business niche. Each time you target a product or service you sell, you can anchor any product page that needs more attention than others. This gives a major SEO advantage to your website and the interactivity of the content further adds value to your brand.
2. Site Navigation
Site navigation is a key determinant in generating positive user experience. But more importantly, it determines if your website is on par with Google’s ranking standards or not. For instance, using Flash navigation does not sit well with web crawlers, especially if you do not know how to make flash objects web-crawler-friendly and accessible. Search engine bots take time when crawling websites that use Flash and hence it is not recommended. Instead, you can use CSS and JavaScript that is completely SEO friendly and can give almost every fancy effect you would have from flash without doing a number on your rankings. Also, make sure your Java or CSS script is externalized when your website is being coded. This can prevent the addition of several lines of code to the HTML document which can lead to slower performance of your website.
3. Headings on Webpages
Headings are an essential part of web design and serve as a roadmap to your website. They are also some of the key elements search engine bots use to crawl your website and determine relevant content. A proper heading used with logical hierarchy helps organize the content structure and allows the reader to find destination content faster and scan the rest of the text more efficiently. This gives the visitor a more refined UX while leveraging your on-site SEO.
You can start by using the h1 tag once on each web page so your visitors can understand the main goal of your page while crawlers can index your website accurately in the respective categories. The positioning of H1 Tags should be above the fold and contain at least one keyword. Headers such as h2 and h6 can help organize the rest of the content, giving it a frame to hold all the information in the relevant form. As long as you are not using headers for stylistic reasons, you can use as many as you like.
4. Tracking with Google Analytics
Google analytics is one of the many free options you get from Google. It is a free analytics tool that helps you remain informed about each page of your website and how it is performing on Google’s search engine. It comes with several useful features to keep tabs on your web pages. You can use Goals Tracking, Event Tracking, find bounce rates, page retention, engagement level, and traffic sources, etc. This helps show how well you are doing and what needs to be improved by tracking specific trouble sectors on your website. Often many design flaws lead to bad SEO experiences which can easily upset the balance of your traffic and Google rankings. With Google Analytics you can easily identify these shortcomings and build a better web design that welcomes your audience, delivering your content more effectively.
5. Page Anatomy
Your page content includes a range of elements such as text, images, CTAs, search bar, navigation buttons and even the empty areas known as white space. Their correct positioning and usage in relation to the principles of the latest web design standards not only decides engagement level but how well it will be received by top search engines such as Google. If your website is neat, informative, interactive and relevant to search intent, then Google will push your ranking up. So, to make your visual hierarchy strong, you must focus on the anatomy of your page.
6. Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions form the core of onsite SEO, giving an overview of the web page and helping web surfers identify which link is suitable for their search entry. <meta> descriptions or tags are a small piece of content that we see beneath every link in the search result pages. They also serve as a key component of the design theme. Write a description that not only tells what your product or service is about, but also entices the user to click on the link. In onsite SEO this is often your best chance of standing out in competition when you have customers that pay close attention to meta descriptions before clicking any result. Make sure to create attractive meta copy that fits in the 160 characters (with spaces) limit and neatly describes what you offer.
7. Keyword Research
Keywords play an imperative role in your entire SEO strategy. The crucial first step to getting noticed and found on the web is to target terms that customers use to search for products, services, and businesses such as yours. In online shopping, even the slightest errors can make a big difference. If you’re selling designer wear boots, you don’t want your customers to search for sneakers on google. Similarly, if you’re a company that sells company formation services to investors, you wouldn’t want to be labeled as a real estate agency. The keywords you select decide all this, and therefore every word you insert into your content has to be accurate so that the right prospects end up landing on your pages.
8. Site Speed
Your site speed plays an important part in your website’s SEO success and serves as one of the benchmarks to great web design. According to the latest survey, a delay as small as 100-milliseconds can drop conversion rates by 7%. Therefore, optimizing your site speed is critical to help you achieve amazing results for your on-site SEO. To check whether your website is performing at optimum speed or not, you can use the free Google Page Speed Insights tool to diagnose faulty areas and get suggestions on how to improve your site speed.
Here is what we have gathered:
Compress images to reduce file sizes
Minimize HTTP requests
Use a caching solution
Minify CSS, JS files
Upgrade hosting
Reduce redirects
Remove unnecessary plugins to reduce server strain
Enable a CDN
Use lazy load for images
9. Sitemap Generation
A sitemap is a directory that holds all your web page information in logical hierarchal order. Sitemaps have always been a main feature of web design and also provide a vital function in SEO. Search engines use site maps to index websites faster and to stay informed about any changes you make to your website. By creating XML sitemaps, you strengthen your internal linking, improve site navigation, facilitate indexing and boost site visibility.
Final Words
A good looking website is vital to any online business that seeks success. However, if the website fails to rank on search engines, very few people will ever get to see it. To make sure your website is search-engine friendly with good aesthetic appeal, implement the 9 web design tips noted above to improve your SEO and rank higher on search engines.
Hamza Riaz is an experienced digital marketer at FME extensions, a leading Magento development agencies. He possesses a huge writing experience on technical topics related to web, AI, technology and digital marketing etc. Hamza has served numerous blogs as a guest contributor and You can find him on LinkedIn.The post 9 Web Design Tips that Complement Your On-Page SEO appeared first on SiteProNews.
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Link: 9 Web Design Tips that Complement Your On-Page SEO
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