Web Designers are everywhere these days. However, there are very few that knows how to build a search engine optimized web design that is ready to make its spot in the top 10 spots in Google search result page. This is mainly because web designers are only trained to do web design. They are not search engine experts to know what are the essential things to do. Most website SEO are an afterthought or done after the website is completed. SEO professional will let the site owner know what needs to be done technically, in order for the website to gain better score to achieve the ranking result.
So what does it take to make good web design?
Factors of a Good Web Design
Good website design should not be mistaken as good search engine optimized website. A well designed website is one that is impressive in design. It has to project the message clear enough and motivate people to browse through it. On the other hand, good website needs to have more than just good design.
Today, we will give you a run through of what are the little things that make a website good and complete.
So let’s get started!
Website User Experience
The ease of navigation is what makes or breaks your customer’s journey in your website. The customer’s journey starts when they first landed on your website to find out about your business. First impression last. That is still very true today in the online world. This makes your website the very first gateway to a new relationship to your business. When someone visits your website, they want to learn more about your business or gain a level of trust with your online store. If they see what you show in the website and like them, you are half way through winning a customer. If they don’t find out what they are looking for, see irrelevant information on your site or find it hard to navigate around your site to find the answer, they will fail your site badly and never return again.
Therefore, you should have a website that is easy to navigate. Clearly show visitors to your site, the path to every connected item, reference and related information. Lead them to what they are searching for and you will get them to love your site and your brand. Top websites usually invest time to plan the sitemap and information prior to design and development.
Website Functions
With well plan site structure and user experience planned. Its time for web development. In the development phase, we should consider what kind of function that you want to build to make the website more user friendly. The basic include contact forms, gallery, social media sharing and a few others. Some include live-chat to make it easier to contact them. For marketing purpose, some website include opt-in form to allow them to collect subscribers. One the subscribers are connected to autoresponder, they can send regular mailing list to keep in contact. Depending on the nature of the business, you want to think about what function to create along with the design of the website. This will make your website look great and include function that will increase sales conversion.
Website SEO
With well design and developed website, you want it to be found on the search engine. This will be the end goal for all website. With good online presence, your website will achieve its purpose and bring meaning to its existence. Lots of website owners spend a lot of money advertising online. It can help you reach out to people who may be interested in what you have to offer. Nevertheless, advertising can be very expensive when compared to organic ranking of website in the search result page.
So what does it takes to rank in the search engine?
Here are a few things you have to optimized in the website to start off with.
- Page load time – Your website need to load fast. Slow website will not gain good ranking.
- Keywords research – with keywords research, you know what are the keywords that you want to rank for in each and every page.
- Content writing – with the chosen keywords, you carefully place them in the page content to make it a good write-out that is relevent and useful for readers.
- Site Audit – After everything above, you can do a site audit to check if the website has all the relevant item checked and done.
Off-Page SEO
After you launch the website, you can start doing some off-page SEO. This will help your website gain authority. Website SEO include on-page, which we covered earlier. On-page focus on the internal elements of website that will affect the site visbility and ability to gain ranking online. These affects how Google and other search engine will index the site and how well they will rank the site. The off-page SEO focuses on building the authority of the site with endorsement from other sites.
What is endorsement we are talking here?
These are backlinks from high-quality or high-authority website. In search engine term, we normally see a website as having high authority when they have the followings:
- High Domain Authority Score
- High Trust Flow
Domain Authority or DA in short, is a metric that is created by MOZ to tell people about the chance of ranking in Google. Its between the score of 0-100, where the higher the score is, the better will be the chance of ranking. High authority website that has good score are usually those that has lots of high-quality backlinks from various websites.
Trust flow is another metric created by Majestic. This trust flow usually measure the relevancy and citation of the site. The score is likewise between 0-100, where the higher it is, the better.
With these 2. The websites are being measure for and rank. If you look into the research tools, you will see that usually sites that rank in the top 10 or 1st page of search engine result page, have high DA.
Today, with the raise in social media, search engine also look at other factors, such as social signals. This mean, how many people are actually liking and sharing your website. Social signals tells search engine how popular you are apart from backlinks.
In summary, Off-page SEO will help your website gain good search engine ranking if you work on the followings:
- High-authority backlink to your website
- Good number of social signals
- Local citation backlinks are good for those who want to rank a business located in a specific region
- Write fresh and good content in your website often
We will cover more about SEO in other post.
In conclusion, today’s article cover the essential things that a website should have. Many website only have well designed website without the rest of what we covered here. If you want your website to work harder for you, you ought to do the rest of these. Most of the website rank because of good technical SEO, which we term it as on-page SEO. The backlink portion which is referred to as off-page SEO will carry heavier weight if the on-page is done well enough. There are many site these days cannot rank beyond page 2. They stay stagnant on page 2 because the site is not well optimized enough to compete with those in page 1.
I hope this article has helped you gain a deep insight to the website creation and what it takes to build the best website.