An online business needs a lethal pairing of a great website design and SEO techniques to succeed in their endeavour. If either of these two is not together, your business will not get the desired results.
To ensure that your website is search-engine friendly, it is vital to take the help of the best SEO company Toronto and apply the basic SEO principles on top of good content development practices.
As a web designer, certain issues come up while developing websites keeping SEO in mind. To combat these issues, apply these effective SEO tips given below and enhance your web design by giving it a great style and creativity.
Your Site Navigation Needs to Be Search-Engine Friendly
If you are using Flash for navigation on your website, we have some bad news for you. It becomes difficult for search engines to crawl a site employing Flash. It is important to utilize CSS and highly ingenious JavaScript to give an alluring look and feel to your website without sacrificing the search ranking factor.
Keep the Scripts Away from the HTML Document
The coding of your site should be done in such a way that the CSS and JavaScript are externalized from the HTML document.
It is important to note that search engines see a website with the help of the things that exist in the HTML document. If the externalizing of JavaScript and CSS are not possible, integrate extra lines of code in your HTML documents.
Most of the time, it will ensure that your website crawls perfectly. Remember, search engines are looking to see the content of a website to be viewed quickly.
Create Content That is Easily Readable By Search Engine Spiders
Content will always be the king. It is the ultimate source that the search engine feeds on. While designing the website, ensure that the content structure, including heading, paragraphs, and links, are appropriately followed.
Remember, sites that do not have lots of content, struggle a lot in the search results page. In most of the cases, this particular scenario can be avoided if you do proper planning in the design stages. A prime example of that is evading images in the text until and unless you are employing a CSS background-image text replacement method.
The URLs of Your Website Needs to be SEO-Friendly
Create search-friendly URLs that are easy to crawl for search engines. The best URLs comprise keywords that assist in describing the page content. If you choose a good CMS, it will give you the scope of customizing and enhancing your website URL.
Block Websites That You Do Not Want the Search Engines to Index
There are certain pages on your site that you do don’t want search engines to index. These pages add little to no value to your content, for example, server-side scripts. This can be the pages that are being used to test your designs while developing the new site.
Remember to select wisely the pages that you wish the web robots to crawl. If that is not the case, you might get into duplicate content issues with the search engines and further dilute the density of your real content. This can harm your website’s search ranking.
You can enable only selected pages from being indexed by search engine spiders with the help of a robots.txt file.
If there is a specific site section that is being used for testing purposes, it is imperative to make it password protected. You can even use a local web development environment like WampServer or XAMPP.
Never Evade Image Alt Attributes
Always ensure that all your image alt attributes are kept descriptively. Please note that all images require alt attributes for it to become 100% W3C-compliant. However, certain companies take the shortcut by only integrating text. Having no alt attribute is better than having imperfect alt attributes.
With the help of the alt attributes, search engines judge the relevance of the webpages with respect to the keywords entered by the searcher. It is also used to rank images on search engines like Google.
Image alt attributes can also be quite handy for people who cannot see images.
Always Update Webpages Using Fresh Content
In case your website has a blog section, it is essential to have excerpts of the latest blogs being placed on all your webpages. Even search engines love it when you keep updating your content on the website. For them, it indicates that the site is live and kicking. When you alter your content regularly, it can have a positive effect on search rankings. Never show the entire post as it can lead to duplicate content issues.
To ensure that your website is not only search-engine friendly but also attractive in design, get in touch with a prominent web design company today!
