Great SEO and website design always go hand in hand when it comes to improving the ranking of that website. While it is important that you have a well-designed website that immediately grabs the attention of the users, you still need to implement SEO methods that can ensure a high ranking for your website. Here are 5 SEO tips that can help you to improve website design and enhance your online traffic.
Keep your site’s navigation features search engine friendly
Avoid using Flash for the website’s navigation unless you know the procedure for making Flash objects web-crawler-friendly and easily accessible. Typically search engines do not find it easy to crawl through websites that make use of Flash. On the other hand, you should definitely consider using CSS and JavaScript as they are both unobtrusive and they can provide you with the freedom and flexibility to create attractive websites without giving up on search engine rankings. Nowadays, a majority of software development companies in India are focusing hard on their webpage’s navigation fully equipped with search engine friendly features.
Do not ignore the Image Alt Attributes
Keep all the image alt attributes of your website perfectly descriptive so that they can be detected by the search engine crawlers. The image alt attributes should be completely W3C-compliant if you are to obtain positive SEO results. It is too bad that many people choose to add whatever text they feel like, not realizing that it can make or break SEO ranking. In fact, no alt attribute text is much better than poor or inaccurate alt attributes. The search engines are going to read through the alt attributes and consider whether they are relevant to the keywords used in a search engine query. This same technique is also in use for ranking in Google Images and other image-oriented search engines.
Use content that can be easily read by the search engine spiders
Keep in mind that content is the basic driving force for any website and it is this that determines the online ranking of a website. Therefore when you design your website, you should come up with a good structure for arranging your website. Sites that have gotten very little content usually tend to suffer from poor ranking. This is something that you can avoid when you plan your website’s design for proper placement of content. As all web designers and web developers in India will tell you, avoid using images for text if you cannot work with a technique for replacing the text in the CSS background image.
Block the pages that you do not want indexing by the search engines
While designing a website, you may have a number of pages that you do not want indexing by the search engines. Such pages may include server-side scripts that have no immediate value in terms of their content. In many cases, these web pages may also simply help you to evaluate the designs as you create your new website. In such cases, it is better not to let web robots have access to them.
Most web programmers will tell you to block these pages as they can lead to duplicate content issues in case you get them indexed. These pages can even undermine the importance of your actual content and negatively impact your online search engine ranking. The most effective way to prevent these pages from getting indexed by the spiders is to make use of the robots.txt file. To separate a section of the website that you as a testing environment, you can keep it protected by a password or work with local web development programs like WampServer and XAMPP.
Update Pages with Fresh Content
In case you maintain a blog site for your business, you should put some excerpts of your latest blog posts on the various pages on your main website. By posting fresh content every now and then, you get to increase your chances of having better online ranking in the search engine result pages. It is a well-known fact that regularly updated content always has a better chance of getting a higher ranking. Just keep the postings short as you don’t want to fall prey to the issue of duplicate content.
Following these above guidelines can really help you a lot when you want to improve the SEO and design efficiency of your website. You can also ask for further help from any web design and development company specializing in search engine optimization techniques.
About the Author
Manoj Rawat is an experienced writer and usually writes on growth hacking, web development, startup ideas, innovations, SEO, SMM, and content strategy. He has over 8 years of IT experience and loves to share marketing tips & strategies among online marketers. He is an avid sportsperson, traveler, & nature lover.