Design plays a major role in making a great website. The visually appealing website can increase the stickiness of the website; however, doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good rank in a search engine. For websites to do well on search engine ranking also need to adhere to certain simple search engine ranking optimisation guidelines during the design stage.
For the success of a business website, it is necessary to attract people to your website, and search engines ranking optimisation is one important way to drive traffic to your website. In our ealier post we discussed 7 Elementary Essentials For Search Engine Optimisation. Today we will look at simple design improvements can boost your websites Search Rankings.
Here are ten simple web design hacks to improve your search ranking.
1. Easy Navigation
One of the most important element of a well-designed website is an easy navigation. Easy navigation not only help your website visitors find desired information quickly but also encourage them to spend more time on your website in turn increase the possibility of sales or enquiries.
Easy, clean navigation gets higher priority while search engine index your website.
2. Sitemap
Breadcrumb navigation and sitemap are other important elements to boost your SEO efforts. Sitemap is the structured page hierarchy that is crawled by search engines.
Sitemaps are to inform search engine bots about the hierarchy of your website and how pages are connected to each other. Search engine bots crawl web pages based on priority and the frequency of updates. Sitemap helps bots to know which pages on your website should be frequently crawled for updated information.
CMS Budo creates sitemap automatically. It provides HTML sitemap as well as the XML file, without any effort from you.
3. Crawlable Visual Content
Some elements such as banners, slideshows and Call-to-action buttons, are often indexed as images. So it is important to provide meaningful image file names and alternative text, to help search engines index them properly.
4. SEO Friendly URLs
When you are designing your website, make sure URL names are simple and relevant. Properly named URLs are easy to remember and share with your customers. Keywords in URLs also helps in boosting search engine ranking.
Instead of using generic page names like page1, page2, use names that will easily convey your page’s contents. For example, a URL like http://www.cmsbudo.com/html/cms-budo-features.html will be easily crawled and indexed by search engines and also easy to remember for your customers too.
5. Social Sharing
Website with a good number of social shares such as tweets, G+1s are also ranked up by search engines. Make social sharing easy for your customer you can use social sharing apps like AddThis. By putting in share buttons close to your best content will help your website visitors easily share it on social networks.
6. Titles and Meta Tags
The titles of each page on your website are vital for search engines to locate during a scan and should be unique to every web page. Your page titles should match keywords and content used on that page.
7. Contacts
For a local business, it is highly recommended to add your address and phone number on your contact page and near header of your page. Not only does this help Google spot that yours is a local business, it also helps your customers find your contact details quickly and easily. It also adds credibility to your business.
8. Mobile Optimised Website.
From April 21st this year, Google decided to expand its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, thus making a significant impact on their search results. If your website is not mobile friendly and responsive, Google will start to penalize your website by not showing it in its search results.
So it is necessary while you design your website it should be mobile friendly. Here are top 5 tips for Google Mobile search ranking.
9. Content Is King
Good website means well-written, informative and unique contents. Your website contents should focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase. Also, add new contents to your website as often as possible. Fresh content can help improve your rankings.
10. Natural Language
Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.
By implementing these few design elements into your website, you will be well on your way to creating a high ranking website.