If you run a business website and you are keen to attract more targeted traffic, SEO is one of the best ways to go about it.
However, SEO is such a large and complex area that it can be difficult to know where to start and how to progress. One of the first things that you need to get right is the design of your website. A good web designer will design your website from the ground up to focus on optimization as much as possible before it even goes live. According to website maintenance experts, a web designer will focus on a few areas.
Navigation
Good navigation is important for many reasons. Most importantly, it allows visitors to use your website to find out where they should be going immediately, which is crucial to keep them on your site for longer. They are more likely to leave if they find the website confusing and cannot work out where to go to make a purchase or find the information they need. However, navigation is also important for good SEO. When you create the pages for your website, you should ensure a definite structure to optimize each page most effectively using targeted keywords. Your web designer will make this much easier by ensuring the navigation is clear and easy to follow.
URLs
Ask your designer to allow you to create URLs when you publish new pages on your website. Some websites make the mistake of automatically generating the URLs, creating long streams of nonsensical numbers and letters. However, the URL is a good place to insert your main keyword and provide information for potential visitors. It could therefore encourage more clicks at the same time as giving your SEO a helping hand.
Structure of Content
Content is crucial for SEO, as you probably already know. You will want to publish new content regularly on your website to optimize it, so you should ensure that your designer makes this easy for you to do by including a blog in your website’s design. In addition, a good designer should structure the content so that you can use header tags and Metadata, which will help ensure good SEO practice whenever you create a new page.
Alt Attributes
If you use images on your website, they have little SEO power. However, you can add descriptive alt attributes to them using your main keywords for the pages on which they appear. Make sure that your designer creates your website so that you can use this feature and that it is easy to do. Optimise Your Website from the Start You can optimize your website over the months and years by building links from various other sites. However, you can make it a lot easier on yourself by starting off properly. A good web designer can incorporate all of the above areas into your website to ensure that you are in the best possible position to start optimising your site and bringing in targeted traffic from the day you launch it.
So make sure you ask your web designer or web design agency how they plan to optimize your site for the search engines before hiring them.