We all know that building an attractive and functional website is an essential part of doing business online. One aspect not as commonly understood, is how easy it is for website owners to lose some SEO optimization on their websites, in favour of highly creative design.
This article gives you some helpful tips on how you can develop your website so that it looks good, works well and boosts your rankings effectively. These tips will help you create an eye-catching website that will impress visitors and engage them while still leaving room for the on-page optimization you vitally need for SEO.
The layout should be simple:
If you keep the navigation and associated links in your site as simple as possible, the search engines will be able to follow them more easily. It will also make your site much easier to use, which will improve the user experience. Be careful with your design too. Think about loading times, and remember that Flash cannot be seen by search engines, and it is no use to mobile devices like iPads.
Try different fonts, or improve your text using CSS:
Most designers and web developers want to use attractive fonts that lend themselves to the design of the website. Unfortunately, graphical text, although it is far more attractive, cannot be seen by the spiders. One way to get round this issue is to use CSS to manipulate how plain text looks so the spiders can still spot it. You can also try different fonts. There are many fonts the search engines are able to read, so play around, and try them out to find the font you like, that looks good, and works with the spiders.
Always label your images and use mouse-overs:
Many websites have large amount of images, especially e-commerce sites with huge collections of products for sale. These images, if they are not correctly labelled, look like big black holes on your website, and the spiders just won't see them. By labelling images and using mouse-over descriptions, or captions, you turn these invisible spaces into content that the search engines will see, and list. Think about the last time you searched for an image on Google. If you searched for an image on your website, would it come up?
Optimize your website for mobileweb:
Your audience, whoever they are, are using mobile devices. They are. And this is not going to change. If your website is not optimized for mobile devices yet, then you will be losing business. Urgently address this so that your website performs properly, and looks great on mobile devices.
The art to making your website work effectively for you and your users is to make it functional and visible first, then you can work on the branding, and design. Developing the site the other way around can make SEO of the entire site an uphill struggle, even if the site does look gorgeous.
The goal is to have an attractive site, easy to use and navigate, and one that guides the user through the website from visitor to lead to customer. Everything about your website must lead to the next step. All these little 'calls to action' will take a visitor through each stage until they are your customer. And this is the most important aspect, which is why we mention it last. After all, your business website is there to sell for you. What is the point in having a gorgeous, flashy website if it's not doing the job?
If you need to, find a professional team who will guide you through the process of redeveloping your website with SEO in mind. You are looking for a balance of looks, reliability and performance - a bit like buying a car!
Check out the relevant video resource at http://youtu.be/BeG1nBl8Lks
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