What is SEO in Web Design? — 3 Handy Tips
Right now, when it comes to marketing and advertising your business, you simply cannot overlook the importance of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short.
SEO is an integral part of a company’s online marketing strategy as it helps them to stand out against their competitors. Basically, SEO is designed to help improve the ranking of a website on search engines when people search for keywords, phrases, and terms specific to a website.
For example, if your business sells running shoes, when a potential customer uses the internet to search for running shoes, you want your website to be one of, if not the first, website that appears in the search engine results.
The better your SEO, the better your search engine ranking will be.
But what is SEO in web design? Let’s take a look, shall we? as we look at a few SEO tips.
Regularly update your pages with new content
When it comes to SEO, there are a number of different elements to get your head around, and one of which is keyword targeting.
Keyword targeting basically utilizes keywords relevant to your site and business.
The basic idea here is that you, or ideally a pro copywriter, will create content to post on your site and/or blog that utilizes keywords that you want and anticipate customers to search for.
Again, sticking with running shoes, your chosen keyword might be ‘running shoes’ or something similar such as ‘athletic shoes’ perhaps.
In terms of SEO, though, your content needs regularly updating for you to continue ranking which is why hiring a copywriter to provide regular articles/blogs is a great way to improve your ranking and keep your content fresh.
Ensure you have search engine friendly site navigation
For you to maximize your SEO potential, another top tip is to ensure that your site navigation is search engine friendly.
If for example, your site’s navigation utilizes Flash, this could affect your SEO because most search engines struggle to crawl through a website which utilizes Flash.
Flash is considered by some web developers to be mainly for show. If you want to show that goes with Flash, JavaScript, CSS, and Unobtrusive can provide many of the effects that you are looking for, whilst helping you to rank well on the search engines.
Place your scripts outside the HTML document
When it comes down to coding your website, you need to ensure that you externalize CSS and JavaScript.
This is because websites will view a site through what happens to be contained within the HTML document.
Problems can arise when CSS or JavaScript add additional lines of coding to your HTML documents if they aren’t externalized, which could make crawling through them slower.
This is not ideal because search engines prefer to reach the content of a website as quickly and as easily as possible.
As coding a website is certainly not easy, it is always best to hire a professional web development company and have them handle it for you.