In today’s fast paced world, your website’s design is just as important for achieving good rankings in Google as having the relevant keywords and excellent content. In addition to traditional SEO principles, there are various aspects of website design Google will evaluate when it crawls your site and determines where it ranks in the search engines. Let’s look at the most important elements of good website design.
1. Easy Navigation
Your site must be easy to navigate with clear direction of where the user should go next to find what they are looking for. A good, crisp design will ensure this, especially if it displays easy to find navigation tabs.
If your site is easy to navigate, visitors will stay longer and this is a big plus when trying to rank in the search engines. The time each visitor stays on your site is easily measured by the search engines and the longer each visitor stays, the more favorable your ranking will be.
2. Page Speed
Good, fast loading pages will definitely ensure a good SEO ranking. Google, especially, likes fast loading sites and will rank those sites much higher than the ones that take ages to load.
There are a number of factors which affect page speed namely large images, flash plugins and clumsy design elements. Run your images through a minimizer plugin to compress them. This will definitely help making your site load faster.
3. Header Tags
Header tags are very important as they let the search engines know very quickly what your page content is about. H1 tags are given the most weight by search engine spiders and these should be used in every article at least once. You can then scatter H2 and H3 tags further down the article to improve both the usability of your site for visitors and for relevance when the search engine spiders crawl your site.
4. Image Tags
The search engine crawlers cannot recognize images and only view them as blank spaces. Ensure that your images have relevant tags so that you’re telling the spiders what the image is about.
5. Mobile Responsiveness
Ensure that your website is mobile responsive so that it can easily and clearly be viewed on different devices like smartphones and tablets as well as desktops. Google definitely favors mobile-responsive websites and will rank these higher in the search results.
6. Internal Link Building
Internal links are just as important for the search engines as they are for your website visitors. When your most recent content gets crawled, the internal links will be noticed and this will ensure that older content is also visited by the search engine spiders and will be indexed.
Of course, we all know that external links are important to gain favor with the search engines and thus get better rankings. This can often, however, be a time-consuming task for the website owner to perform so many will use a link building service which can be very cost effective.
Conclusion
To summarize, good clear website design with fast loading pages and relevant header tags can be very important for SEO purposes. Ensure also that your photos are optimized for speed, you have relevant internal and external links and your site is mobile responsive.
If you have all these important elements in place, there’s no reason why your site can’t rank on the first page of Google for the relevant keywords that you want potential visitors to search for.