“First impression is the last impression”. This becomes the case for the innumerable people who search for practically everything & anything online. Before making any purchasing decision, users perform a search on major search engines on the internet.
Hence, having a website which can represent the business online has become an indispensable need in modern day marketing. The websites become the face of the company and can influence a decision in favor of your company. However, just having a website is not enough. It is also important for the website to show up in the search result when people search for related keywords. This is where SEO kicks in.
People generally search for the products or services they need. For the users who search for the products/services offered by your business, it is imperative that your website gets listed on the first page of the search results. Otherwise, you don’t exist for that customer.
So how do you make sure your website ranks for these keywords? Why should search engines choose to show your website on the first page when people search among thousands or more sites that are more related to the term? While SEO includes many things like off-page & on-page, content, backlinking of pages, inter-linking of pages within the website, etc., this article talks about the role SEO plays in the design of your website.
SEO and its significance in Website Designing
SEO & Web designing are the birds of the same feather that must flock together! Even in this era of digitization, many designers choose to ignore the SEO aspect of web designing. On the contrary, SEO brings a lot of value to a website at their nascent stage, i.e. designing.
On Page-Speed Optimization
It is not enough to just have a website that is catchy and attractive. It becomes easier to get traffic to the site if it has an SEO-friendly web design. But, dozens of plug-ins and paid themes can make a website slower to open/load. If a search engine cannot open your website quickly & easily, it is unlikely to rank high in search results. Incorporating SEO best practices in your website goes beyond just content and linking. It needs to happen with technology decisions, site architecture, navigation and more. And this is where SEO can play a vital role in your website design.
Content
Without content, there is no use of the internet. The content of your page is the paddle that keeps the SEO wheel moving. The designer should know what the website is all about. This will enable them to make a list of keywords that users will search for to get information that exists on the website. The right keyword density will help the page rank better in search results. Keywords should be added while the website is being created to save money and time, as you would not have to go back to an already created web page and make changes to the content for SEO reasons.
Off page optimization
Off-site optimization is about link development. This includes in placing links on other sites that direct to your page. This plays an important role in increasing the search engine ranking of the page.
So now we know that SEO is as important to creating a website as the design itself. A website design that is SEO friendly will make the page rank high on search engines and bring traffic to your website, rather than cater to SEO once the website is made. If SEO were incorporated from the web design stage, then you would be spending less time and money in undoing what is already done and adding newer search engine-friendly techniques to get your page ranking.
