SEO Is Critical, and Here’s What Every Web Designer Needs to Know

Web optimization and design go hand in hand. Web designers and search engine optimization (SEO) specialists rarely agree on how to create the best possible website. It’s easy to see why they wouldn’t see eye to eye: it’s a web designer’s job to make sure visitors to their sites have a pleasant visual experience. SEO experts, on the other hand, are more focused on increasing the site’s visibility.

Both of these are, in fact, extremely important. Web designers are necessary for an effective and user-friendly website, but search engine optimization is essential for widespread exposure. But should there really be such a clear divide between them? Or, is there a way for them to merge peacefully so that they can help one another?

Web developers can provide anticipatory assistance in search engine optimization, while search engine optimization (SEO) specialists can boost the site’s effectiveness. Let’s take a look at how SEO specialists and web design agencies can work together for mutually beneficial results by emphasizing the importance of certain design elements in making a website more optimized.

Authorize the “Reading” of Pictures

Nobody likes to read a website that is just one giant wall of text. Because of the need to break up the monotony of large amounts of text, images are commonly used in website design. While this improves the user experience, search engines need the code tag (img>) to know that an image is present. The image’s content is visible to the user, but it is hidden from the search engine’s evaluation system.

The context of an image is crucial for it to aid in the site’s discoverability in relation to appropriate search engine queries. But how does a designer make it so that search engine robots can “read” an image? Changing the image’s title and alt text in a media management system like WordPress is a common practice.

The Media Manager will keep a database of all the site’s images, so when you give one a descriptive name, you can use that name in the HTML code that references it. Now that the term has been rendered into text, it can be read by search engine crawlers. Naming an image “Empire State Building” increases the likelihood that it will be returned in a search for images of the Empire State Building or New York City. This is how image searches function in most search engines as well.

Adjustments for Mobile Use

More people use their phones and tablets to visit websites now than use a personal computer. Due to the prevalence of mobile web browsing, search engine optimization strategies increasingly focus on giving preference to sites that are compatible with mobile devices.

Every web designer needs to be aware that their site must neatly and effectively respond to both PC and mobile devices because search engines favor PC and mobile-friendly sites. Google recommends using dynamic serving and responsive web design to better accommodate mobile users. Neither of those options will affect the website’s URL. However, a mobile browser will be redirected to a mobile-friendly version of the site automatically.

Some web developers can’t get enough of embedding Flash videos into their sites. Giving up on it as much as possible is another way to make a site mobile-friendly. Flash video has been largely rendered obsolete as a web media format. A site’s search engine optimization (SEO) is improved the less Flash it uses.

Use HTML and web fonts to aid search engine spiders.

Previously, we discussed how to tag images so that search engine spiders can “read” them, but many images also include text. This text might be too long to be put into the image tags, so designers need another way for all the image content to be “visible.”

Using web fonts like those found on Google or Fonts.com, search engine crawlers can still “read” these images or banners with text included as they look for optimal matches to search engine queries. Combining these web fonts with HTML tags (like H1 and H2 headers) still lets search engine bots understand the image’s context. If the text contains relevant keywords, then the search engines will be able to understand them, which is great for the site’s SEO.

Maximize Content in a Simplified Layout by Using Expandable

Minimalist Web Designers Mississauga may find it difficult to work within the constraints of their sites’ displays to optimize them for search engines. A product-selling website, for instance, could use a minimalist design that emphasizes visuals over text. This approach, however, is not ideal for SEO purposes.

Expandable div> attributes can be used to make images clickable, and the extra space gained by doing so can be filled with more SEO-heavy content, rather than simply being dumped into long alt names of images. Because the text is hidden until the image is clicked, the design is minimalistic, and the SEO is excellent because all of the relevant search terms are still present.

Incorporate State-of-the-Art Web Features Using HTML5 and CSS3

SEO for websites is greatly aided by modern markup languages like CSS3 and HTML5. These help websites are designed with a well-structured format. In the absence of that, all other SEO considerations are moot. Semantically accurate and well-structured web pages make websites more search engine optimization (SEO) friendly. HTML5 is helpful because it facilitates the creation of pages that are more easily adaptable to bot crawlers and helps to replace the inefficient and outdated Flash.

Reduce Waiting Time

In 2010, Google started factoring page load time into their search algorithm, so sites that wanted to rise in the search results had to figure out how to improve their load time. A revision in the overall design was necessary. Rendering media takes the most time when a website is loading. The bigger the image file or other media types, the longer it takes to load. The trick is to keep the file sizes of these media down without sacrificing quality.

Web designers who use HTML to shrink image sizes are making a common mistake. When an image is uploaded at full resolution and then scaled using HTML, it wastes valuable system resources and slows page loads. The key is to optimize the image for web viewing by decreasing its file size, checking the quality of the final product before uploading it to your site.

Superb Content Development

It is preferable to incorporate an SEO content creator into the design process early on rather than later. The advantages of this strategy include saving time in the long run by conducting research for keywords, optimizing the site structure, and brainstorming ideas for new designs as you go. Collaboration between designers and content creators is essential for optimal results.

One Last Thing

Most designers should now be convinced that it is to everyone’s benefit to collaborate with their SEO experts rather than argue over the finer points of SEO-friendly design. Adopting SEO-friendly practices, however, benefits any web designer beyond just getting along with SEO experts. If you follow the outlined straightforward but effective procedures, you will be rewarded with significantly superior outcomes.