SEO and effective web design go together and are important to your overall web presence. Think of them as one.
Great looking web design and SEO Services is about creating a website that fully engages the reader and gets them to take action. If the website does not follow current SEO best practices, its rankings will suffer which will in turn lessen the number of visitors that actually engage with it.
And just as important, if the focus has been on Canada SEO and pleasing the search engine spiders, the site may rank highly and get lots of search engine traffic, but once that traffic lands what will they see? Will they be engaged? Will they take action? Not if the design is poor. They must believe they will be spending time and energy getting a website for their company that will engage their client base and allow their company to look legit.
In order to be successful in today’s digital landscape, equal focus must be given to design and search engine optimization.
Doe SEO Stifle a Web Designer’s Creativity?
A great demand for “optimized design” has been placed on web designers in the last five or so years. Before this, designers had the luxury of focusing mainly on the human experience, not the “bot” experience. Designing a website was about creating big, bold headers and beautiful graphics. It was about developing not just a site and a layout, but a thoughtful experience.
Nowadays, Cape Breton web designers are not just asked to make a site look attractive, but to make sure the call to action fits “above the fold” and the site loads quickly. Breadcrumbs must be employed, smart navigational choices made, CSS must be used and JavaScript files need to be kept to a minimum. That’s a tall order, and some designers wonder if all of these new SEO rules are hurting their freedom to simply create.
There is something to be said for clean design, however, and at the end of the day, it is clean design that will help a site load faster, be easily crawled by spiders, and allow for a brand’s message to be seen by the maximum amount of eyes. So in reality, creativity and optimization do need to be able to flourish together side by side.
Sum it Up
There are some core elements that support every strategic SEO initiative and Nova Scotia web design project:
Keyword Analysis
When launching a business website, thorough keyword analysis must be conducted. In order to do this, business leaders must intimately understand their target customers and define how that demographic fits into the larger target market the business is attempting to reach. Then, proper optimization for that audience and thosekeyword phrases should be done.
Technology
Before a site can be designed, some questions first need to be answered regarding the technology that will support it, namely, which platform will the site be built on (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.), what scripts and applications will be required, and what programming language will be implemented? When a decision is made, the entire project team must be committed to that decision 100%.
Content Hierarchy is Your Friend
A well optimized website is a website that’s friendly to both humans and spiders. It’s not enough for a business to create good content, they must also strategically plan where that content resides. Effective planning means placing related content into virtual silos through the use of creative and thoughtful design and internal linking.
Think from a User’s Point of View
Typically, a lot of thought and planning goes into the navigation of every site, but the reality is that users won’t always arrive through the front door and follow the trail of rose petals you’ve left for them. The more pages or posts your site has, the more opportunities there are for people to find you, and when they land on any of those pages, you need to make sure you can help them get around easily. This means making it instantly clear where they are and allow them to get from page to page in as few clicks as possible.
Why is Strategic SEO so Important?
Unless your brand is well-known, it is usually the search engines that are responsible for most of the traffic a website receives. Beyond this, it is organic traffic, not paid, that generally receives the most profitable clicks. Strategic SEO has the power to leverage important customer data and tap into new potential income streams.
Having proper site structure and information architecture will ultimately allow businesses to offer an engaging user experience at the same time as decreasing the need for site tinkering with each new growth spurt.
Tips for SEO Web Design and Site Architecture
The following tips will help you design a site that is not only user friendly, but SEO friendly as well. Also, an excellent reference is SEO MOZ Web Development Cheat Sheet.
- Use clean code so spiders can crawl it easily
- Externalize the code to streamline it and allow for faster load times
- Site design should start with content structure, keeping user experience in the forefront
- Make navigation structure clear and easy to follow
- Be sure Meta tags are at the beginning of the page for easier crawling
- Site speed also depends on good server health, so check it often
For an online presence to succeed, SEO Services Cape Breton and web design Sydney Nova Scotia have to work in tandem. Designers who make an attempt to stay on top of the latest SEO best practices have a much better chance at producing a final product that does the awesome job it was designed to do.