A website can be a visually stunning digital representation of a business, but unless search engines can find it easily, it’s just something nice to look at while not drawing in your targeted visitors and customers. In order for websites to really work effectively, they must get good search engine rankings so that people can find them. Sure, great content helps, but the work actually begins with the web design process, where basic search engine optimization (SEO) elements can be incorporated. Don’t think that creativity and design have to be sacrificed in order to accomplish effective SEO. There are several ways to incorporate SEO best practices without ending up with a boring web presence.
Begin with a sitemap
A sitemap is a basic starting point for the layout and extension of your website. It’s also a great tool to improve site navigation, because it lets search engine web crawlers search each page of your site. It essentially makes each page easier to find while cutting back on the number of clicks that users and web crawlers have to go through before getting to the content they want. As another step forward, XML sitemaps list all the pages of a website as well as the dates they were last changed, and when submitted to search engines, will help them locate and link to a site’s content.
Avoid Flash and images as text
Quite simply, web crawlers that index websites ony read text and can’t really analyze Flash or image files. They may be nice add-ons, but don’t rely on them as vehicles for your content. Flash navigation menus prevent the web crawler from indexing the pages linked in the navigation, so your site will have areas that aren’t indexed. And when it comes to image-based text, remember that it will be invisible to search engines too, so don’t put important information there. It’s safer overall to stay with jQuery or CSS browsing code and create content that is purely text-based.
Optimize site meta tags
Meta tags provide a summary of what the website is all about. It’s important to make meta tags enticing as well as functional, because they’re what users will read when a page comes up in search listings, and they can make all the difference between users clicking through to your site or moving on. Ideally, meta tags should be 150 to 200 characters and should be written in terms of what people would be searching for naturally related to your product or business.
Add relevant content and a blog
Content is king when it comes to SEO utilization, and ensuring your content is relevant to the targeted keywords, meta tag information and alt tags is critical. Keywords rule when developing website content, but be sure that you don’t stuff in keywords so that the content is not readable because visitors will be annoyed and leave. If content is good, then fresh content is even better. Adding a blog is a good way to revitalize content without a lot of work. Search engines look for fresh, unique content, so adding a blog is a great SEO booster. Creating a vehicle for site visitors to interact with blog questions and comments also adds to search engine optimization.
By incorporating these important search engine optimization tips into your website design, you will dramatically increase the probability of boosting not only website visibility, but also immediate and long-term sales through efficient search engine rankings.
Two ways Reztech can help you out with SEO
We have a free SEO analysis tool to give you a quick snapshot at how your site looks to search engines and stacks up against the competition. We’re also happy to offer a free 30 minute consultation to get you on the right track to ranking and bringing in new customers who are actively searching for your products or services. Get in touch and let us know how we can help.