Your website design can either increase your web traffic and increase your sales, or it can discourage web traffic and produce some disappointing results. Worse, your website design can make your business virtually invisible to all but the most intrepid Web researcher! Here are three tips to help you help the search engines find and fall in love with your website!
Website design should support SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is something you should become familiar with, especially if you intend to increase the amount of business you do via your website. Even if you don’t ring up actual sales through your website, you should consider your SEO strategy if your customers and potential customers use the Web to find you.
Monitor your keywords carefully. Keywords are words and phrases your customers type into search engines in an effort to find you, your business or the products and services you sell. There’s an art to selecting keywords, and the major search engines all offer keyword tools to help you decide the best combination of keywords for your site. The keywords should appear in two places on your web pages: in the meta tag information that is stored in the page’s HTML header, and in the actual text that appears on the page. It’s ok to have different keywords for each page, but the keywords should relate closely to the text on the page, and should be terms that a person would type into a search engine.
The search engines have gotten less helpful over time when it comes to describing keyword effectiveness, so choosing your keywords will become part science, part art. In either case, keywords should feature into your website design as an important element.
Take time to learn about SEO There’s no cookbook approach to search engine optimization. It’s a process that you should pay attention to, and incorporate into your website design when the opportunity presents itself. Search engine companies periodically change their search algorithms, meaning that your site could be on top one day, and on Page 3 of the results the next. While the search engine companies will never say exactly how they decide to rank search results, it pays to understand how search engines see your site, and observe how changes to your website design can either help or hinder search engine results.
Responsive website design rules! Today, users connect to the Web using a wide variety of mobile devices, and your website design needs to be able to accommodate them all. Responsive website design allows you to present a website that looks good to the user, regardless of whether they’re using a desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone. Responsive website design is critical, especially if your visitors are on the go!
If you would like more information about website design, search engine optimization or responsive website design, contact our Creative Director, Dave Ramsell or give Dave a call at (330) 243-0651 to set up a consultation.
Photo Credit: dillia, via StockXchng
