The purpose of your website is to share your brand and reach customers. But if your site doesn’t rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs), your target audience may never even see it. That’s why search engine optimization (SEO) is so important.
Gone are the days when SEO was strictly a content concept. Now, SEO factors into how your website is built, designed, and then the content that is placed therein. If you aren’t sure that your website is SEO optimized to help you rank well on SERPs, there are some things you can do to improve your site design.
SEO Tips to Improve Your Website Design
Put together by a web design agency in Savannah, GA, here are some important SEO tips to help your website design and any content you place on your site perform well.
- Use SEO Friendly Site Navigation
Many people used to use Flash for their site navigation. Now, Flash is seen as being inaccessible and less user-friendly than options like CSS or JavaScript. In fact, Google and other search engines have a hard time crawling sites that use Flash. CSS and JavaScript both can give you an appealing site and many bells and whistles without the problems that a Flash site can bring.
- Externalize CSS or JavaScript
During coding, externalize your CSS or JavaScript outside the HTML document. If you code inside the HTML document, your site may not perform as well because there will be extra lines of code that appear ahead of the site content. That makes crawling your website closer, and can impact your ranking.
- Make Sure Content is Easy to Crawl
Search engines feed on content, so it is important that your website content is easy for search engines to crawl. That means setting up your web pages with a good structure, such as headings, paragraphs, bullet points, graphics, and links. As suggested by this Atlanta SEO company, you should also make sure there is a substantial amount of content on your site. Search engines tend to avoid sites with little content.
- Make Sure URLs are Search Friendly
Just like search engines crawl your content, they also crawl your URLs. URLs should be easy to crawl, and should describe what the content on the page is all about. For example, if you own a roofing company, some good URLs that are search friendly would be:
- Myroofingcompany.com/roofing-services
- Myroofingcompany.com/residential-roofing
- Myroofingcompany.com/contact-us
Not so search friendly URLs may look like this:
- Myroofingcompany.com/residentialroofingserivces
- Myroofingcompany.com/contact-form-goes-here
Sometimes, a URL will be automatically generated based on the level one heading of your page. Be sure to check them before publishing your pages or blog posts to make sure they are SEO friendly.
- Make Sure you Have Fresh Content
If you have a blog on your website, it is important to make sure that your content is fresh. From time to time, review your blog posts and see which ones are not generating any traffic. These pages can be updated with fresh information, which indicates that your blog feed and the site as a whole are alive.
- Use W3C Coding Standards
When it comes to coding, everyone likes a nice clean code. We recommend using W3C coding standards to make sure that your site is easy to index and is well optimized. These changes can only be good for SEO.
