What is SEO Web Design? Tips and Benefits

Designing a website is an art, but designing a website for the search engine is a science. In order to rank your website on Google or to “do SEO” for it, the website needs to incorporate some basic elements that can ensure search engine indexing and visibility. Often companies make the mistake of designing a website that is only for the search engines or make websites that are only for the users. However, the right way is to make a website that is a combination of both – user friendly as well as search engine friendly.

Top Web Design Tips for Successful SEO

Whether you are designing a website yourself or getting it done from a professional web design company, here are some SEO web design tips that will help you get the desired SEO success:

1. Beautiful Front End with SEO-Friendly Coding: Most companies make the mistake of stuffing loads of content and links on their website for SEO. While this can deliver great search engine success, it can drive away users due to lack of design appeal and rich look and feel. Make a website that has a good combination of content as well as attractive graphics. In addition the website must have a semantic code along with descriptive tags.

2. Avoid Keyword Stuffing: For search engine success, it is recommended to use keywords in strategic areas like URL, title tag, and head tags. However, it is important to use the keywords sparingly and intelligently. Stuffing the tags with keywords can lead to the website getting penalized.

3. Avoid Using Flash: Flash, although might help you create a beautiful and aesthetic design, is extremely detrimental to search engines. Search engine robots cannot read flash files, resulting in flash-based pages, links or navigation not getting indexed.

4. Tag All Images: Search engines cannot directly read images. Thus, for this you need to particularly tag them with “alt” tags to indicate the spiders as what the images are about. Failing to do this can cost you substantial traffic.

5. Minimal Page Load Time: This is one of the most basic but extremely critical factors. You may have the most wonderful website, but if it takes ages to load, then this might drive your users instantly. Search engines recognize this fact and hence penalize website with huge page loading time by keeping them at a lower position.

6. Quality & Concise Content: Content is the king, especially when it comes to SEO. Thus, your website must have great quality content which is crisp and concise. Make sure that every landing page has a minimum of 300-350 relevant content for search engine success.

Often, web designers and SEO professionals are at loggerheads. Web designers blame the SEO guys for spoiling their layouts with drab content additions while the SEO guys blame the web designers for sacrificing conversions and usability at the altar of aesthetic design. The best way out is to have the best of both worlds.