Basic SEO for Web Design
Taking all the necessary steps to optimize a website for the best possible search engine ranking can be tough. All it takes is a little dedication and know how to make sure people will be able to find your website. We know all the ins and outs of SEO and love to share our knowledge.
Web Crawlers
It’s important to know how web crawler’s work to make sure you can maximize your site’s visibility. Even if you have launched a beautiful website, if nobody can find it’s useless. Search engines such as Google utilize web applications known as spiders, web crawlers, or bots, to search through web content on sites that are registered with that search engine.
You can submit your site to a search engine to be found or just wait for their web crawlers to find it. Today’s web crawlers will search through your page’s meta content as well as the text, images and elements.
A good starting tip is to keep all your text near the top of the page. Google’s search bots will only look some portion of you content, text toward the lower portion of a web page will most likely be passed over.
Content is King
Search engines don’t focus on your meticulously perfected layouts. They primarily scan the content. The text contained in every paragraph, heading, subheading, video transcriptions, image names and ALT image names are looked at. A page with 1,000 words of unique and relevant content will help rank your site higher than a page without text. This doesn’t mean you should stuff meaningless words on the page.
Make sure you have something useful and relevant that adds to the site. Text on your site should be original – even if you decide to build a new site, you shouldn’t reuse your old bio or about me text. This will result in a lower search ranking for posting duplicate content.
Nowadays design and graphics are also important. It’s not really a trend to have a responsive website anymore, it’s an industry standard. Any site you build needs to also be optimized for mobile devices as well or else this can result in a lower ranking as well.
Keep it Clean
Web crawlers the source code of your website to view the content. This is why it’s important to have properly organized code and use best practices for web design programming. The bots don’t respond well to sloppy coding. Try and make use of external JavaScript and CSS files since spiders don’t focus as much on these elements.
Keep in mind that SEO doesn’t have to be hard. It’s not differential calculus, it’s just a matter of being diligent and mindful of how your website will be indexed and found. It takes a lot of time and experimentation to find what works best for your site. It’s recommended to consult a professional and do plenty of research before you start implementing an SEO strategy. These tips are just the beginning, to learn more or consult with one of our SEO experts by contacting us today.