Are you one of those who believe that the internet marketing campaign starts after deploying the website? Search engine optimization is an essential internet marketing process that starts way before your website becomes accessible on the internet. When you are working on designing of the website, it is essential to consider the SEO factors as well. The way search engine sees a website is different from ours. The search engine crawls through the content and the content can be text, image, infographics, audio or video. We can call it a universal truth of the internet marketing-”Content is the king”. However, majority of, even experienced web designers try to make the web graphics more eye-catching to grab the attention of a visitor and ignore the optimization. It should grab the attention of the search engine also. Moreover, SEO friendly website design can help get more traffic.

Therefore, it is important for web designers and developers to have basic knowledge of search engine optimization. If you are working on the designing of a website then you must make sure that the design is user-friendly and search engine friendly as well. Here at TemplateToaster web design software learn how you can make your website design SEO friendly:

Responsive Website Design

Needless to say, and it can be seen in various reports related to the global mobile internet usage, the number of users accessing the internet using mobiles phones and tablets is more than that of desktop users. As it was predicted by Mary Meeker, a renowned analyst, this happened in the year of 2014. Therefore, you must make your website accessible on mobiles and tablets. If your website is having a responsive website design, it can be easily accessed from any device. Moreover, Google gives better ranks to mobile-friendly/responsive websites. For this, you need not to develop and deploy separate dedicated websites for mobile devices and desktops.

Develop a responsive template/theme and use it in your website, it will be automatically reshaped and resized according to the size of the screen. WordPress, Joomla and there are few other powerful content management systems which you can use to design your website without having programming knowledge. You can download one of the plenty of free responsive templates/themes available on the internet. If you want to use your own template/theme in your website, you can use a template/theme generator for this. The generator software automatically generates theme/template. all you have to do is drag and drop elements you want to add in the theme/template.

Include SEO Optimized Text

Text has always been and is an essential part of a website. The text you are using in a website is always under the radar of Google. If you are using copied text or there are spelling and grammar mistakes, you cannot survive Google’s Panda site penalty. Even after making the website live, users can still have to add a lot of content on the site. However, there is some text added when the website is being designed. You cannot deploy a website with blank web pages. The name and description of images or videos you have uploaded in your website should be keyword based. Titles of web pages should be of 50-60 characters and also consist of important keywords. Similarly, the meta description consists around 150-160 characters along with with focus keyword to optimize it for the search engines.

Optimized Images

Using images and infographics is a great way to enhance the visual appearance of the website and engagement with visitors. Text you are using in the infographics should include important keywords. You may have seen many websites having a slide-show on the home page. Each image in the slide consists of a text which is added while designing a theme/template. Add keywords to make that text SEO friendly . By naming images as abc.jpg, image1.png etc, you are actually stopping the search engine from searching your image.

If you are running an online jewelery store then the name of an image of a necklace should be like goldnecklace.jpg. This improves the visibility of the image when someone searches for a gold necklace. Making proper use of HTML attributes to images and creating captions for images can optimize images. Moreover, only add an appropriate number of images to avoid any impact on the total load time. There are a bunch of graphic design software for this task.

Text-Based Navigation System

Users and search engines use navigation system to visit different parts of a website. Therefore, it should be planned and designed by keeping search engine optimization in mind. Make it text based so that search engines can read it. It is important to use search engine friendly technology when you are using drop downs. Web designers aware of SEO always recommend CSS to create menus. Experts don’t recommends incorporating JavaScript and Flash based menu systems. Having a link deep up to three levels is not advantageous when it comes to the optimization. The other best thing you can do is using keywords in the URL. You can drive traffic using text-based SEO friendly website design.

Redirecting

Any mistake you commit while redirecting to the new version of your website can adversely affect the traffic and ranking. Your visitors will receive 404 error when you delete old pages without proper redirecting to the new pages. Moreover, for search engines, that web page does not exist and therefore, it will not be included in the searched results.

Using 301 redirects can save you from losing traffic. It tells the search bots that the old version is replaced with the new version. Moreover, it also counts all the links to the new page from the old page. Don’t forget to use optimized keywords in the updated permalinks when you redirect to the new version. In addition to this, you can also redirect a visitor to some other page of the website by using a customized 404 page.

Conclusion

Admittedly, it is very important to make a website attractive and user friendly. However, making it search engine friendly is equally important. Therefore, developers and designers should learn at least some of the important SEO techniques. They should know how the crawler works and how websites ranks. Or, an SEO professional should always be there with the team working on a website.