io, you think a designer has got nothing with SEO. To some extent, it may be but I must say, SEO has got something to do with the design and structure of the website for sure. As Google is changing its metrics and shifting focus on visitors’ loyalty, loading time, average time on website and more such minute issues, it is becoming a necessity for designer to come with a design that looks good and feel good too so that visitors find a homely atmosphere to spend more time in the website which will have a direct bearing on the visibility of the website in Google’s SERP. In simple English, modern website needs to be simple yet highly powerful to accommodate future changes depending on the algo shuffle.
Here we are going to share some characteristics of a great website that can help it make SEO protected and algo proof, at least, we can fancy so:
Make it Simple: Search is a complex thing but Google is always trying to make things simple for users and so, it is your duty as a designer to make your website simple. However, I am not asking you to deny your creative streak all the time. No certainly, what I am asking is to make the entire thing looks aesthetically pleasing to look at. Try to reduce the use of bells and whistles like heavy images, loads of JavaScript applications, heavy flash files etc, as they can kill the design besides adversely affecting the online visibility of the website to some extent.
Add Freshness: Would you ever like to revisit a website, where change never occurs? Definitely not because there will be nothing new to explore. The same thing is applicable with search engine bot. Bot is likely to visit a website where changes are made fast and thick. However, I am not suggesting you to change the entire structure of the website every week. Just suggesting you that you should add a dynamic field at the least in the home page so that it keeps getting refresh and thereby giving enough reasons to search engine bot to crawl your website frequently and frequent crawl will lead to better online visibility. This is the reason why news sites are being crawl so frequently because the dynamic nature of their template.
Reduce Boilerplate template: Boilerplate template as you all know it is a combination of ‘elements designed to be used over and over’. So not that much great for the health of a website, and therefore, it makes perfect sense to reduce its over usage expect some exceptional cases. It might look good from designing point of view but it is a pointless addition from search engines perspective. For example, if a page contains only boilerplate templates and nothing else, it deserves to be delisted from SERP because it is showing information from other pages and has nothing of its own. Better get rid of this practice.
Reduce Loading Time: Since loading time is going to be the next big factor in the SEO industry, you should make it a point that your template score at least 75 when tested in Google Online page Speed tool. Try to club images in a single image via CSS Sprite, make some tweaks in the .htaccess file etc in short go for every minute thing that can make your website fast, really fast. Whenever possible, try to preload elements by using rel=”prerender”
or ‘prefetch’ elements but make sure that it makes sense and in tune with the user’s behavior. Take a pledge that you will never use large images unnecessarily and never use flash when it is not absolutely needed. And bingo! You will have your share of success.
Michael Evans is a passionate writer and he has been writing for Site2You which is the best business website builder. He has written different article on web design, online marketing and SEO. He is equally enthusiastic about latest gadgets.
