When users go on the World Wide Web, they want to get a hold of an array of information, depending upon what they currently need. So, if you want your target audience to notice your company, a strong online presence is absolutely necessary. Modern consumers tend to initially research products or services they need before deciding whether or not they will purchase something. In other words, if your business still doesn’t have a site that includes your offers, contact information, and properly channels your brand identity to your audience you are missing out. Now is the time to create and launch your website. Once this is taken care of, in order to get more prominence and visibility, you will need to move it up the search engine ranks by optimizing it.
This might seem a bit complicated, especially if your company has nothing to do with website design and development. But, don’t worry, this is the age of information technologies and online marketing. There’s an endless array of reputable and trusted website design agencies in San Francisco out there that would be excited to create a site for your company. Furthermore, some companies provide a lot more complex services than just design and launch websites. Such web design agencies conduct a complex set of tasks on your website in order to give you an advantage among your competitors who are also competing to get their slice of the market pie. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the things you should definitely take care of before launching your website.
When creating a website for your business, it’s important to ensure it is engaging, designed beautifully, and functional. However, it is also vital that your site can be found easily – this is where SEO comes into play. Search Engine Optimization is now essential when doing any website design or digital marketing. SEO is the key online marketing tool that drives people to your website and ensures visibility on the most widely-used search engines.
Finding a Perfect Balance
The goals of web design and Search Engine Optimization can sometimes be in opposition; while web design tends towards minimalistic uses of text, SEO requires repetitive keyword usage throughout the page.
This trend for simplicity and using images to engage visitors and create a user journey doesn’t leave a lot of room for well-optimized pages that have been laced with relevant keywords. And on the flip-side, a nicely designed website can appear beautiful, clean, and minimalist but may lack the critically important information needed to bring visitors to your door.
This creates a classic paradox of the chicken and the egg: do you create a text-heavy, SEO-optimized page that seems overwhelming to the user? Or a simple, attractive page that lacks key info and may get lost in a sea of other web pages? How do you find the balance? What determines what a perfect, contemporary-looking, and SEO-optimized page looks like?
Page Scopes
The best thing about SEO is that it’s page-specific. One page can rank for this while another ranks for that – but for every webpage you create, ensure you have determined its purpose before publishing. If the webpage has been created purely to be a landing page for a paid ad campaign, then a clean, simple, image-focused page will be appealing to users. But if the page is intended to rank organically on search engine result pages – as the majority of them are – then highly-optimized pages with well-considered copy is essential.
Intelligent Website Architecture
As well as the usual SEO practices, there are various other site architecture techniques you can implement that won’t affect the clean design of a site and will also help with search engine rankings.
Blog Pages
Regularly posting blogs is a great way of adding content to a site that is rich in relevant keywords, attractive and engaging imagery (with keyword-optimized alt-text) and internal links pointing to other relevant pages on your site – all without cluttering up important key landing pages where slick design needs to take priority.
Section Headings
Originally intended to resize the text on a webpage, H1-H6 section headings also help search engines understand the organization of content on particular pages. Both users and search engines don’t want to wade through long blocks of text to ascertain what it’s about. Arranging written content into smaller sections helps users digest the information and leads to improved organic search engine rankings.
Expandable Divs
In addition to well-optimized blogs, another great way of adding indexed content on a site is by creating expandable divs. These collapsible sections are revealed by clicking on a small section of the screen and displaying more in-depth information about something, such as a product or service, including relevant images which help increase conversions and user engagement. Expandable divs offer the advantage of having little effect on minimalist page design while creating great SEO results by providing long-tail text to index on search engines.
Calls-to-Action
The ultimate goal of any e-commerce site is to create a simple and convenient way for people to purchase your products or services. A simple way to encourage conversions is to include a call to action in the form of buttons, links, and images accompanied by text that explains to users the outcome of their action. The purpose of a call to action is to guide the user quickly and simply along the sales funnel by encouraging them to purchase a product, subscribe to a newsletter, request a catalog and more.
Internal Links
Creating internal links in a piece of content that point users towards a related resource can improve SEO results. Search engines find your pages best when they’re linked from elsewhere. Links also give search engines a better idea of the structure of your website because they’re able to establish a hierarchy of pages on your site and attach better link value to the pages that are higher up.
Conclusion
Nowadays, web designers and design companies are able to access far more options and technological tools than they could even just a couple of years ago. Technological advancement is moving forward at a rapid pace. Web design processes have become so sophisticated that some sites on the web are simply breathtaking. However, at the initial stages of your site’s development, it’s crucial to make your priority a concentrated focus on your target audience. This is vital for your website’s SEO rankings after its launch. Depending on what your audience needs, the content of your site will have to include certain keywords that will serve as a guiding light for your potential customers when they will be looking for your products or services via search engines.
High-quality web design services bring great value to businesses, users, and search engines alike. As a business owner, you get to represent your company the best way on the web, while your potential customers get the opportunity to know your brand better and search engines get content to work with. This collective effort creates what seems to be the best environment for business development in the modern marketplace. And search engine optimization is, without a doubt, one of its most critical aspects.