When setting up websites, there are aspects that can work hand in hand together. In particular, web design and SEO are essential in the aesthetic and performance characteristics in how well a website can do. It’s practically pointless to have a nice looking website without anyone being able to see it. In this article we share 5 Easy Steps to Help Your Website to Rank in Search Engines.
Throughout your career as a web designer, it’s likely that you’ll work closely with internal teams or agencies that specialise in search engine optimization. This is to ensure that design of the website also has a presence on the marketing side. Therefore, it can be useful to understand how web design and SEO work hand in hand together to produce a website that not only looks nice, but also functions in a way that benefits its search engine ranking.
Here are 5 easy steps to help your website to rank in search engines and get the required exposure and traffic.
Table of Contents
Relevant Content
They say in SEO that ‘content is king’. This is because having good quality content is believed to be a necessity by Google in order to satisfy your users. By showcasing content that is relatable and knowledgeable to your audience is likely to increase visitors to your site. The idea is to attract users to your website by targeting relevant keywords, optimising your content and making it informative to your readers.
Keyword research is essential in SEO. Gain an understanding of the purpose of your website and the services or products it provides and research keywords that are relevant to your niche. How would your audience search for the services and products displayed on your site? How often is it searched for? Is it relevant to the page that’s been created? These are questions that will help you choose the right keywords to target.
Target one keyword per page
It can be difficult to rank several keywords for the same page. So, if you have a core keyword, product or service it would be ideal to create a page for the specific detail. For example, if your business specialises in hairdressing, you may optimise each page for different services i.e. haircuts, blow dry, highlighting etc.
Placement of keywords
Once you’ve identified the best keywords to target, you then need to place the keywords in your content. Optimisation through keywords can be done in several ways:
- Main content
- Headings (H1, H2, H3 etc.)
- Links
- Meta title and description
Where you can try to include your chosen keyword within these. At the same time, try not to ‘keyword-stuff’ the content with your chosen keyword. Aim to implement it onto the page as naturally as possible so it’s clear the intention is still to benefit the user, rather than write your content for the sake of search engines. The best pages perform well because users are able to engage with it well.
Updated Content
Search engines always have their user in mind when it comes to deciding which pages they should rank the highest. This means considering what content is the most up to date to the user. From a user’s perspective, they’re less likely to engage with a page if it’s seen as outdated or not current.
Updating content regularly means you’re providing your user with fresh content that’s well up to date. This is why it’s common for websites to have a blog. It can be tougher to update main landing and product pages compared to a blog which promotes evergreen content. Where possible, keep up to date with trends in your industry so you can update your content as it happens.
Optimising Metadata
As you know, meta tags enable a page to be titled and provide a description to summarise the page in small detail. These aspects of web design are crucial in search engine optimisation as it’s the first detail that users see in search engines. These are also one of the first aspects that search engine crawlers read when they try to decide if the page is relevant for specific search queries. Therefore, it’s important that your keyword is inserted into the meta data.
The meta title is the main heading for the page and displays at the top of the web browser window. It’s also the blue link text that’s found in the search engine result pages. This is considered the most important aspect of metadata. These titles should cater to the different pages on your website depending on what it’s about.
The meta description is where you can provide an appealing description to your audience that encourages them to click on the link. Ideally, you’d have around two sentences that will also include your chosen keyword. Whilst meta descriptions are considered less by search engines it can still be extremely beneficial for your users.
Descriptive Anchor Text Links
Providing descriptive links in your content can be beneficial for SEO. Firstly, including keywords as part of the links can improve search engine rankings as it’s well optimised for the page. It can also allow search engines and users to make sense of what is being linked to and what the page the user is about to click on is about.
Not only this, but descriptive anchor links can be beneficial for users with disabilities that require screen readers.
Using Alt Tags
Search crawlers are only able to read text. This means content that is in video or image form can’t be understood and isn’t beneficial to helping your website to rank as high as it could. If you utilise content and images in your website, be sure to optimise them with alt tags.
These allow search engines to understand that there is an alternative form of content being displayed on the page and what it’s about. Image alt tags are highly beneficial. Similarly, transcribing videos allows you to add further content to the page and allow users to understand what the video is about in a shorter time.
Rank your website through web design
From the points highlighted above, it showcases how web designing and SEO work hand in hand. There can be many occasions where web designers need to collaborate with SEO agencies to ensure that both aspects are covered. When collating your web pages, ensure that the checklist is covered for design and search engines so that page can get as much exposure as possible.
We hope these 5 Easy Steps to Help Your Website to Rank in Search Engines have been helpful and thanks for reading.
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Author Bio
Jamie Costello is an experienced freelance marketing writer based in Manchester, UK. He utilises knowledge taken from education as well as several copywriting roles to help produce his articles. He’s currently working closely with an SEO Manchester based agency.