Search Engine Optimization, a.k.a SEO, is often seen exclusively in connection with digital marketing and content. However, it is equally important for a professional graphic designer to understand and apply some basic (yet crucial) SEO principles, especially, while creating a website design.
These SEO principles for website design can contribute to creating an equal amount of impact as any other digital marketing technique for the online branding of a business.
And, therefore, today we’ll discuss and share these SEO principles for website design that every graphic designer (or business owner) must know.
The underlining objective of executing SEO techniques for a website is to help it appear higher in search results.
A user search for a specific service or a product by entering relevant words, or phrases. These relevant words are basically the keywords that the search engine crawlers use to find relevant pages on the web to provide results.
As a professional graphic designer, it becomes important for you to use such relevant keywords in your website designs in order to make the website more searchable.
You must have a list of top keywords related to your brand and use them strategically across all the pages of the website.
A good SEO practice for website design is by using the primary keyword in the title tag, the URL, and the main heading (H1 or H2) of each page.
Professional designers, especially website designers, are known to rely heavily on image-based web development tools. However, when it comes to web design for SEO, the images used need to be optimized appropriately in order to become easily searchable.
It is important to ensure that all the images used on your website (including those in the blogs) have descriptive alt attributes assigned to them.
Search engines read alt attributes and take them into consideration when determining the relevancy of the page to the keywords a searcher queries. It also helps in ranking on image-based search engines like Google Images.
One of the important SEO principles for website design is creating an easy navigation process for website visitors.
It can be very tempting to use heavy flash files to create navigation bars and graphics for your website. However, when it comes to applying SEO techniques for a website it can become very difficult for your web pages to get crawled by search engines.
This is primarily due to the fact that search engine spiders can have a hard time to crawl a website that uses Flash.
A good idea in such a situation is to use CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript that can offer almost any of the fancy effects you are looking for without sacrificing your search engine rankings.
The homepage of a website is the most important page out of all. Mainly because of the fact that it is the primary gateway for your website visitors and, therefore, would be the deciding factor for your website’s success; ensuring whether the visitor would stay or bounce back.
Therefore, as a professional graphic designer, you must ensure that the home page design of the website is on point and have all the necessary information for, both, humans and search engine spiders.
Your home page should contain the most important words, such as a company’s name and what it sells, and links to critical pages, such as the “about us” and contact information sections, as text.
Another very important part of the set of SEO principles for website design is to maintain consistency with your design coding.
Yes! This sounds a little technical but, professional UI/UX designers would understand its importance and application.
When you have a simple and consistent website design structure, your code and design elements are cleaner and easier for everyone to process, including the search engine spiders.
For example, a website design undergoes updates and revisions several times over the years. Now, if the main ‘root’ location is kept the same, rather than using sub folders for each version, the SEO history of the page does not reset with each new version.
This makes it a lot easier for the search engine spiders to remember your site map and reach your website content faster every time.
To conclude…
Holistically, creating a website design includes a lot of work to be done on the front as well as the backend. Following these important SEO principles for website design contribute largely towards the backend work but, are extremely crucial for the success of your website overall.
GraphicsZoo carries extensive experience in providing custom website design services for businesses across different industries. Let us handle the technicalities of your website design and make it SEO friendly.
Get in touch with today at support@graphicszoo.com
