SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is more than just increasing traffic to sell products or promote a brand online. It’s actually a science and has a lot to do with how your website is perceived by casual visitors and consumers alike. Of course, this is not the only solution for getting traffic, but it has proven to be the most effective one by far.
Say for example your website ends up attracting users from another site that has content similar to yours. Those users are actually attracted to it because they think they will get similar and more informative content from your website as well, which may not be the case. In other words, even if they do not like what they find, chances are they will bail and may never come back either.
SEO’s Role in Web Design
This is one of the reasons why SEO and web design have to go hand in hand in order to attract modern day users. Unfortunately, many businesses forgo this stage when they get their websites updated or designed, not knowing that effective SEO practices can actually boost their site’s ranking. Making a website look ‘trendy’ by filling it with unnecessary technology will only make it more cumbersome to navigate and slow down browsing at the same time, two things which can kill your web presence easily. In fact, it can even slow down or block a search engine that is trying to access it!
However, by incorporating effective SEO practices in your content, you can attract those search engines and thus more traffic easily. This goes beyond just linking to sites that have similar content; ease of navigation, the technology you utilize as well as your site’s architecture will determine how far your web presence goes online.
SEO has a major hand in making that possible and one of the best ways to increase it is by making the content more relevant to the page it is on. This means that before working on the design, the website designer should be made privy to the content of the page so that he/she can come up with a list of keywords that users might type to search for that particular information. If the keywords are added during the design process, not only will it save time but it can save you a lot of money down the line.
This does not mean the designer should stuff the content with keywords, relevant or otherwise! The trick is to set one keyword per 100 words so that readers don’t think they are being forced to buy or take action on anything. Doing so will make the webpage more search engine friendly and place it high on search results as a consequence.
Many website owners forget the importance of off-page SEO during the creation and which is just as important. This basically involves a lot of link building from other sites that have relevant rather than just similar content on their pages. However, none of these practices will bear fruit if your web pages are not SEO compliant.