No matter how big or small your business is, your website is the place consumers will land when they’re searching for your products and services. Most visitors will find your website through search engines. So how do you make your website “visible” to the consumers who are looking for you? Search engine optimization (SEO) is one powerful way in which you can help your website catch consumers’ eyes.
Website design can improve website performance
Here are 5 things you can do immediately to improve the performance of your website in search engine results.
Optimize your website. If you’re not familiar with website design, this tip might not make much sense to you. What does it mean to “optimize” your website? Take advantage of the built-in HTML coding that search engines are looking for. Make sure that all of your website pages have well-defined tags, keywords and descriptions. Give all of your images descriptive tags, and make sure all of your images have captions. Choose specific keywords that best describe your business, and make sure your keywords make it into the content on your web pages.
Update your content. Updated content is one of the hallmarks of a “living” website. Static websites that don’t change often aren’t likely to attract a lot of repeat visitors. Businesses that take the time to update their content regularly tend to reap the rewards of good search engine rankings. Moral of the story: update, update, update!
Use your keywords. Keywords aren’t just for tags and text. Use them throughout your website design. Include them in the content on your website, put them in page titles, and insert them into captions, tags, and image names. There is a point of diminishing return, however. Overuse of your keywords is called “keyword stuffing” and it will get your site banished to the nether regions of search engine results. If your keyword density (the number of times a keyword is used compared to the total number of words on the page) exceeds about 4% in your website design, you run the risk of being penalized.
Link! Links can be a very helpful SEO tool. You can create links between content pages or areas on your site, and that can help boost your SEO results. Links from other sites to yours can be preferable, but it depends upon where the links are coming from. Links that come from related, relevant sites are good. Links that come from random, unrelated sites – not so much. In fact, too many unrelated links incorporated into your website design will get you penalized, too. You can also get penalized if you link to many sites that are unrelated to yours. Be careful who you exchange links with.
Create a sitemap. Your site is patrolled by search engines. Giving the engines a simple, straightforward map of your website design will help the engines understand what your site is about, and how it fits into someone’s search requests. It also helps human visitors navigate easily around your site. You can’t go wrong on website design by having a good sitemap.
If you would like more information about how you can work simple, effective SEO practices into your website design, contact our Creative Director, Dave Ramsell or give Dave a call at (330) 243-0651 to set up a consultation.
Photo Credit: Yuman, via StockXchng
