Website design is not just about the way it looks on the outside. It’s about the way website functions, its structure and the way it’s put together by the designer. Web designers are innovative and skilled professionals that are responsible for ensuring the functioning and structuring part of your website.
One can easily hire web designer online from various sources like websites or app-based portals. Most of the designers (and other professionals as well) prefer to look for job opportunities online nowadays.
With the rise of digital marketing, designers who are skilled in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are highly in demand. However, SEO is not something that can easily be mastered. It requires a strong command over fundamentals. If you don’t know much about SEO then there is nothing to worry as we are here with the 8 Must-Know SEO Fundamentals for Web Designers, who wants to get started with search engine optimization.
1. Website Structure
Your website’s structure plays an important role when it comes to search engine optimization. As a web designer, it is important that you have a clear and pre-planned structure for your website. Yes although it’s crucial that you experiment with the site structure and try to come up with something new and unique. It is also important to follow a standard design for your website structure.
For instance, the user should land on the website homepage when they open your site, the website should have a well-defined navigation system, an ordered and proper linked sub-pages, etc. Well, most of the designers would recommend you to use a number of layers of sub-pages required. But an SEO expert would recommend you the opposite, as Google might have a problem in crawling through all those web pages. This could seriously affect your websites ranking on Google search engine result page. So it is recommended that you make use of only the required amount of sub-pages for your website generally keep it up to just 3 or 4 layers.
2. URL Structure
URL is like the binding text for your web-pages and they can heavily affect your site rating. However, URLs can be optimized for a better ranking on a search engine. So it is important that you make sure you have SEO optimized URLs from the beginning. Here is a simple explanation on best URL structure for SEO from MOZ. There are certain rules or guidelines one can follow while choosing a URL for their website such as –
• Always go for a shorter URL – Not only a shorter URL easy to remember, they work better when it comes to web page crawling.
• Describe the content – now this is really important as the URL must have some relation to the web-page it is supposed to be linked with. This not only considered a good SEO practice but is also very common among today’s web designers.
• Include keywords – keywords are like the heart of search engine optimization. A search engine displays a page that has more keywords related to the search text (although certain guidelines are to be followed). And when a search engine searches for web pages the first thing it looks up is the URLs.
• Improve readability – make use of hyphens, Colon and dashes
3. Image Optimization
Although search engines and computer cannot understand images directly they still do make use of them. As a web designer, it’s your responsibility to not only use images in a way that not only looks attractive but is also SEO optimized. The search engine retrieves images from a database when they load a website. Now, this is done again with the help of links and image address and name. So you must always name your images smartly in a way that it’s shorter, easy to read and is SEO optimized. Also it also highly recommended using a smaller image size as much as possible. This excessively increases the loading time of your website. But to this, you might lose a lot of visiting users and your SERPs ranking as well.
4. Site Navigation System
Your website navigation is not just important for your users, but it also plays quite an important role in search engine optimization. The navigation system must be self-descriptive and easy to use for both the users and the search engine. The website navigation menu must be either at the top of the side or in the side panel. Every web page must be linked to your navigation system and your users must be able to navigate to the desired page on your site easily. The important thing to note is that web designer must avoid creating orphan pages at all cost. The web pages which are not mentioned and reachable through the navigation menu are completely gone even for the search engine.
5. Content Structure
The content is the king of search engine optimization and online sites. Structured and well managed oriented data gives your websites a boost in the search engine making it a lot faster, readable and quicker to load. The content organization benefits are not just limited to the website loading speed, a well written and quality content brings in new traffic to the website. And at the end of the day, all this hard work if for increasing traffic to your website.
6. Website Interface and User Experience
Don’t let the technical burden of the site structure ruin your website interface and hence the user experience. There is no use is creating a fast loading and extremely plain website if it does not have an interactive interface providing amazing user experience. A great website interface will compel to your user to stay on your site way longer than expected.
7. Meta Description
A Meta description is a small text that appears on the screen when you hover your mouse pointer on your website link on the search engine result page. This directly does not affect your SEO but it does affect the number of people clicking your site link in SERP.
8. Responsive Design
All that hard work of yours going to be wasted if you don’t have a responsive website design that is your website must be compatible with every platform. Whether it is a desktop, mobile phone, tablet, iPhone, etc., the website must work smoothly.
