8 Essential Tips For Web Designers To Improve SEO

Posted in Featured Article on Sep 12th, 2011 |

SEO Tips for Web Designers

A website that looks good will be useless unless it is built to be SEO-friendly. Web designers will tell you that their goal is to create a website that looks outstanding. But from a business point of view, having a website that only looks good might not be the most ideal solution. There are different elements to a website that affects its performance in the search engine. Ultimately, we all want our website to rank high in the search engine so that we will get more traffic. This is where a web designer should pay attention because some designs may cause the website to be less accessible in the search engine. Now, we are not saying that the web designer must be an SEO expert.

However, it would be great if he know how to make their website good looking and SEO friendly at the same time. Here are some tips that could help web designers do just that.

Tip 1: Anchor Text

If use correctly, the Anchor Text can provide a lot of traffic to your website. If you do not know what an Anchor text is, it is a hyperlink that comes in a form of text. When a visitor clicks on the text, he or she will be directed to the target page that you have inserted in the anchor text. By implementing this, you can create more back links to your website. Here are a few useful resources that you can check out to know more about Anchor Text and how to use them effectively.

Tip 2: Images

Love it or hate it, images plays a big part in the process of SEO. It is very influential in the Google Image Search. So, labelling the images can improve the SEO of a website. Although the process of labelling images can consume a lot of your time, it is worthwhile doing so because the text that you have labelled could well be the reason in bringing more traffic to your site. See the tips on how images can improve SEO:

Tip 3: Accessibility

The accessibility of a website is also important because there are all kinds of users out there using different type of browsers. So, a website must also be accessible to those who like to use the ‘not-so-popular’ browsers. Another important thing to take care of is the visibility for the visually impaired. So, it is important to make a website that can be identified by screen readers. With this, even the blind can read your website. See the additional reading materials to get more information about improving accessibility:

Tip 4: Title Tags

Use your Title tags wisely. It is a description of an online document that you often see at the top of the browser. The use of title tags in SEO is far more important than keywords. So, when you are putting contents on to a website, remember to put the main keyword phrases in front of the title tag. These words must be accurate and concise to describe the content of a particular web page. So, by creating descriptive title tags for web pages, you can get better rankings in search engines. See how title tags work and how you can optimize your website with it:

Tip 5: Speed

Make the speed of your website fast. Provide website visitors with a better web surfing experience. This will improve the SEO as visitors can load up your pages quickly. If a website takes a long time to load, it will not perform well. Therefore, the best thing to do is to design a website and build it in a way so that it will reduce the loading time.

Here are a few ways you can implement to make your site faster:

Tip 6: Choose a good platform

The search engine works in a specific way. Free platforms are not advisable because it does not allow the user to control important things like meta-tags and internal linking that plays a huge part in SEO. For WordPress blogs, there are hundreds of templates available out there. It is important to choose one that can allow as much customization as possible. There are many tools and platform that a web designer can use but they have to be careful which one to go for. This is because not all of them can do well in SEO. For instance, Flash an Ajax are great designing tools but using them will limit the website in its SEO performance. However, things can be changed if Flash is used together with HTML. This way, the website can be very search engine friendly. As for Ajax, things may be more difficult because the search engine is still making improvements to index the sites that use Ajax. Therefore, HTML is still the obvious choice for web designers to handle links in websites. See the useful resources below:

Tip 7: Your Website’s code

Like the language that we use, it is important to make it clean so that other people can understand what we are trying to say. The same goes for the computer language. In this case, it is the HTML language. For a website to perform well, the codes must be clean so that the search engine can read it. Don’t get me wrong, we can be creative and use CSS but everything that we do must be organized so that the website can perform well in the SEO. See how you write better codes here:

Tip 8: Convert Your Visitors

The most important for a website is to convert a visitor into a subscriber or a customer. So, no matter how good your website looks, all your time and effort will go to waste if it is unable to make the visitor to take action and leave their details. Try to grab the attention of the visitor and increase the interaction between the website owner and his visitors. That is the ultimate goal of the website. You can have a lot of traffic but if no one is converting, you will be wasting your money with advertisements. Therefore, a great looking site will only be spectacular if it is able to convert visitors to buyers. See how you can increase your conversion: