The world of SEO can sometimes be a mystery. It’s an ever-changing set of rules that can affect your ranking in search engines, and every so often the formula will switch up. As a web designer, you may be focused on creating visually stunning sites, but integrating SEO-friendly practices into your designs can take your work to the next level.
There are a few ways web designers can help optimise their websites from the ground up. By considering how search engines interpret your designs, you can ensure your creations not only dazzle, but also rank well.
In this blog, we’ve put together four practical tips for designers to implement SEO friendly web design that not only create beautiful, functional websites, but also optimise them for search engines.
1. Ensure no duplicate content or pages
When you begin to work on a web design, it’s important to create a sitemap. This is where you can identify key pages within your website, the structure and most importantly, eliminate any areas where ‘duplicate content’ is a risk.
Duplicate content is bad for SEO because a search engine can’t decide which version of that information will be most relevant for the user. A search engine needs to provide the user with the best search experience, and duplicate content is a huge road block for it to be able to do this.
This same rule applies to content that is duplicated from other sites. If you’ve noticed a new competitor in your industry has duplicated a lot of elements from your site – whether it’s layout, images, or copy – rather than challenge it, it’s wise to update your content. This will work in your favour because not only will you be refreshing your content, you’ll also avoid the risk of being penalised by Google.
If you can identify an area where duplicate content will be a problem from a sitemap, it will save a lot of time that may have been wasted further down the line, and allow for more time to be prioritised on other important aspects. That’s why it’s vital for both web design and content writing to work closely.
2. Implement social and blog feeds
If your business or client has an active social media platform, a good best practice for SEO and web design is to implement a feed into the homepage of your site. If you post regularly on your Instagram for example, an API can work in the background of your website and pull through your feed to your homepage. Search engines can then link your social media account to your website, showing that your site is regularly updated.
Similarly, if you have an active blog section, this constant stream of fresh content will also give your site a boost in rankings. This is because search engines favour websites that update their content often, as they see your site as being relevant.
If you include these as standard into your site creations, you and your clients will benefit from a boost to your overall SEO efforts.
3. Help implement target keywords and call-to-actions
While designers aren’t always responsible for content generation, they can certainly design for SEO and help with creating page titles, categories, and CTAs for example. Channeling your designer eye, you can help make improvements to these crucial elements and give your SEO efforts a boost. Getting involved with your digital marketing team, making suggestions, and sharing your ideas will always be welcomed.
For example, if you’re a company in engineering that offers several services, such as honing, CNC machining, drilling, tapping, metal casting, and specialist welding, you need to think about how search engines can identify the specific services you offer.
Simply putting ‘Services’ on your top level navigation is not enough. However, changing this slightly to ‘Engineering Services’ is not only going to help search engines identify your industry quickly, but also provide a positive user experience because your audience will understand straight away the type of services you offer.
4. Optimise your images
Possibly one of the best SEO friendly web design tips we can offer is to optimise your images. If your website’s load time is too long, this is viewed negatively by search engines. While there are a lot of factors that can contribute to how long a page takes to load, one of the main culprits are unoptimised images.
Any images that are uploaded to a website must be fast to download, and this often means using an image optimiser, like TinyPNG, to reduce the file size. This will help your pages load much faster, helping to reduce bounce-rates and improve your performance rating.
Designers can also optimise their graphics straight from Photoshop, using the ‘Image Size’ and the ‘Save For Web’ options when exporting, also having a direct effect on your SEO performance.
Are you in need of SEO friendly web design?
As a web designer, you have the power to influence how websites perform and how easily they can be found by users. By implementing these four key strategies, you can design for SEO and ensure your sites are visually striking and primed for search engine results.
If you’re looking to enhance your site with SEO friendly web design, we can help. At Fifteen, we specialise in crafting websites that not only look stunning, but are also optimised for search engines. Our experienced team of web designers work closely with our SEO specialists to implement key strategies to create seamless user experience while improving your sites visibility in search results. Get in touch with today to find out how we can take your website to the next level.
