SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and effective website design go hand in hand. Good website design is about creating a website that appeals to your target audience and letting them take some action. However, if the site does not follow current SEO best practices, its ranking will be affected, resulting in fewer visitors actually participating in the site.
Conversely, if you focus on search engine optimization and how to please search engine spiders, then the site may rank high and get a lot of search engine traffic, but if the design is not satisfactory, it will be different. It is. In order to succeed in today's digital environment, the focus must be on website design and search engine optimization.
1. But, does SEO not kill the creativity of web designers?
In the past five years, the huge demand for “optimized design” has been accepted by web designers. Prior to this, designers focused on the user experience rather than the "robot" experience.
Today, designers not only want to make the site look attractive, but also to ensure that the call to action must meet the "folding" requirements of the site page, the site must be loaded quickly, must use the breadcrumb path, clear navigation options, must With CSS, JavaScript files must be kept to a minimum... this is a daunting task.
Some designers may wonder if all these new SEO rules would undermine the freedom to create a website?
For "clean" website design, it can help a website load quickly and be easily crawled by search engine spiders. Therefore, in reality, creativity and optimization need to be able to “prosper” together at the same time.
Second, combine them together
There are some core elements that support every SEO strategy and website design project:
Keyword analysis
A thorough keyword analysis is required when launching a commercial website project. In order to do this, web designers must understand the target audience of the customer closely and define how the demographic structure of the audience fits into the larger target market that the company is trying to achieve. Then, you should do the appropriate keyword/long tail keyword optimization for the website.
2. Content hierarchy
For a company, creating good content is not enough, they must also strategically plan where the content is.
Effective planning means putting relevant content in a virtual container, with a creative design and internal links that make the content hierarchy visible at a glance. And, an optimized website is a website that is friendly to both users and search engine spiders.
3. Think from the perspective of the user
In general, the more pages or articles you have on your site, the more opportunities your target users will find. When they land on these specific pages, you need to make sure that you can help them find you easily.
So you have to think from the user's point of view, let the user know immediately the current location of the page they are visiting, and help the user switch from page to page with as few clicks as possible.
3. Why is the SEO strategy so important?
Having the right site structure and information architecture will ultimately help companies deliver a compelling user experience while reducing the need for every new growth. However, unless your brand is well known, it is often the search engine that is responsible for most of the traffic received by the site. The SEO strategy has the ability to leverage key customer data to mine new potential revenue streams.
For website owners who are trying to do SEO, there are some places that are often troublesome. Now, I will provide search engine optimization suggestions for website owners to get higher ranking pages.
1. URL structure
URLs created by most websites contain many random characters, such as question marks, no keywords, or anything of value. When the search engine's URL contains SEO keywords or phrases, the page will rank higher in the search engine. Therefore, it is very important to set keywords in the URL.
2. The title of the page
One of the most important factors in search engine ranking is the page title. However, many websites have not changed their page titles. In the Lime website, you can use the SEO title tag plugin, which makes it easy for you to create titles for your articles and pages.
3. Duplicate content
No search engine likes to see duplicate content. Duplicate content is a major issue for some websites, as category pages and calendar/date pages often cause search engines to find the same content on multiple pages.
There are several ways for website owners to overcome duplicate content issues. One way is to use a robot.txt file to guide the search engine which pages should be ignored, leaving only the main page to be indexed.
4. Meta tags
When designing a traditional static website, you can enter a meta tag (description) for each page. Although the impact of these tags on search engine rankings is not as great as it used to be, having these tags on your page doesn't hurt.
However, most site-building platforms do not give users the option to add meta tags when writing articles. For users of the Lime website, adding a meta tag plugin will allow you to enter a meta tag for any page.
4. What is the role of web designers in SEO?
Search engine optimization is an ongoing process that cannot be achieved by designing a website in a specific way. Of course, web designers should put a lot of effort into helping customers build an optimized site, but what are the responsibilities of web designers for SEO and what are their responsibilities?
As a business owner, the optimization of your website is more important to you than the designer (this is not to say that the designer does not care, but the designer's attention is usually focused on the visual and functional aspects of the website). You know your customers/leaders better than the designers, so you should have more constructive advice on your goals.
Maybe some customers may not know much about SEO and target keywords, so the ideal situation is to let customers and you work together on this issue.
In my experience, one of the easiest ways to get customers involved is to simply explain the words and phrases (titles, copywriting, etc.) used on the site that have a direct impact on the site's ranking.
I usually ask customers to give me a list of words and phrases that they think potential visitors might use in their searches. This is especially important when designing websites in industries that I am not familiar with.
Of course, some research may be needed. Should the customer take responsibility for keyword research or should it be the responsibility of the designer?
My experience is that this research is usually more effective if the customer is involved, but this is not always possible. Designers should have enough knowledge to advise clients and should be willing to help, but in the end it is best to get the customer involved as much as possible. In fact, if the customer cares about SEO, the participation process will achieve a more reasonable expectation.
Setting realistic expectations may also be the responsibility of the designer.
I have some potential customers who come to me and say, “I was told by SEO experts that by inserting popular keywords on the website page, I can rank my website first or second”.
In this case, I will obviously point out that "search engine optimization requires continuous work, and this kind of work can usually not be done by creating a website in some way."
I often advise customers to add a blog on their website to get more content and increase their chances of ranking.
Conclusion
While this is a short summary, these are the most important SEO topics that website owners and designers will face. By understanding this knowledge, you can better create websites that are user-friendly and search engine friendly.
This article is designed by Yi You Xiaobian Original Authorized to publish Yiyou website, unauthorized, reprinted.