Considering that there are thousands of web designers in the market, one needs to choose carefully to find the right provider that will meet your needs and budget. Whether you’re a small start-up business or a multi-million dollar company, you need a web designer who can give you their full attention. Many aspiring digital entrepreneurs make the mistake of looking for the cheapest provider at the expense of quality. Such people fail to appreciate that the website design is a strong factor when it comes to ranking on search engines.
So how exactly does website design affect where your company’s name lands on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)?
Site navigation
Your website should be easy for search engine crawlers to navigate. Make no mistake, if you want your site to rank better, search engines should be able to make their way around your pages with little hiccups. When your site is easy to navigate and the pages are well organized, search engines will take note. Google has been known to favor well-made navigation by adding sitelinks beneath your URL in the SERP.
Responsive design
The number of people accessing websites on mobile devices continues to grow by the day. When a programmer is working on your site, it’s crucial that they make it responsive to tablets and smartphones – not just the iPhone, either! When you make it easy for your audience to access the content on your site, you get more traffic, and the search engines may improve your ranking. On the other hand, if visitors are unable to load certain images or pages and the bounce rate increases, search engines will penalize you for it by lowering your rankings. This also goes across browsers as well, so make sure your website loads properly on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and yes, even Microsoft Edge.
Proper internal linking
When people visit your site, you’ll find that they’ll spend more time if your pages are linked well. Linking encourages visitors to jump around your site and read more of your content, but it is also beneficial for search engine optimization! Linking makes it easy for search engines to index your pages.
The size of the site
It may not always be true, but when it comes to website design, size does matter. Search engines value content, a lot. If your website has a good amount of well written content, you can bet that search engines will take note. The more content you have, and the better it is, the longer people will spend on your site. These are signals to search engines that you’re providing useful information to your audience, and when others go searching for something similar, they’ll keep you in mind.
Website updates
One is never done with a site; think of it as a living, breathing organism. Once you’ve published content, it’s advisable to go back and refresh it after a few months. Making regular changes to your site is a good SEO practice since the search engines will notice these changes. Keep the latest SEO trends in your radar as well. Search engine algorithms keep changing, and it is up to you to learn about the changes and update your site accordingly. One of the best ways of increasing traffic to your site and creating constant, fresh content is by blogging on a regular basis. If your blog updates are interesting to your audience, they will keep coming back for more.
The use of proper coding
When building the site, your web developer should ensure that everything they do targets search engines. When they code, they should avoid using HTML from word processors, since search engines cannot read it. If search engines can’t read your website’s code, it will certainly not do well rankings-wise.
Making it online requires a lot more than just getting a website out on the internet. There’s a lot to think about in terms of branding, logo design, advertising, and reputation management. Just because it is difficult and time consuming doesn’t mean you should forgo it, however! Good websites that rank favorably are one of the the first steps to growing your business – both online and off. If you need a team that can take care of the online side of things so you can focus on refining your business, give us a call today!