Website Design and SEO – What to Consider When Designing Your Website

Website design and SEO, or search engine optimization, go hand-in-hand from the initial conception of a website. Often, many business owners don’t think they should consider SEO until after their website is completed. This simply isn’t true. Not only should an SEO website design appeal to your target audience. It should also be structured for the search engines as well. These simple one-time elements, or on-page factors, can act as a bonus to your search engine rankings once your site is live.

When you first start mapping out your website design, you’ll need to focus on some specific factors to increase its visibility on the search engines. For starters, you’ll need to determine the prime domain name for your site. It’s always best to include your keywords within the domain of your website. For example, if you sell widgets, you would want your focused keyword phrase for widgets within your website domain. Your chances of getting noticed by the search engines for your top keywords are certainly increased if they are already within your name!

Next, focus on the keywords you want to target within the body and headlines of your text. Be sure your keyword research includes words or phrases that are known to convert versus those that are just informational searches. You can conduct your keyword search by using keyword research tools. To find new keyword ideas, use Google’s Keyword Tool. These converting keywords are known as longer-tail keywords.

Consider the density of these keywords within your text and pages of your website as well. Please do not stuff your website with keywords. Not only is this not acceptable by the search engines, but it is certainly not pleasing to your prospective customers who are your reason for wanting to host a quality website in the first place. A good rule of thumb is to include your phrase or keywords within every 100 words or so of website copy. Just make sure it has a natural flow.

Also, verify that your website pages aren’t too large or take too long to load. If possible, try to keep your file size for each page under 100K. A recent indication is that search engines are also ranking websites by their page speed.

Last, and certainly not least, is the relevance of your content. Arm your site with quality content that is not only original, but also relevant and informative to the end-user. Quality content is essential within the parameters of website design and SEO. Another interesting note is that the search engines tend to prefer older sites, but those with fresher content. So, once your site is live, make sure you are continually updating it with quality, fresh content.

Chances are, if you’ve hired a website SEO design professional, they are already ensuring these elements are in place. However, you’ll want to be armed with the knowledge and information of the basics of website design and SEO. This will save you time, money, and valuable rankings in the future!

When you have a great web design, you need to justify it with good a good search ranking, something you can do with an SEO company that actually brings tangible benefits in the form of traffic and conversions. Of course, you need to hire the best SEO company to obtain the best SEO results.