Great web designers know how to make our website feel and look fantastic. In reality, there are many things they do that can affect our website’s ranking. Their techniques and methods could have massive impacts, both positive and negative. It should be noted that some web designers think that SEO is beyond the scope of their works and they have blatant disregard for this topic. In SEO, content is king. Web designers may not create a content-focused layout for our website and they could avoid things that spoil their design. In reality, people use websites because they are functional and informational, not because they are visually pleasing.
Text significantly influence our search engine performance and if we don’t add enough content in the website, we could rank quite low in Google and other major search engines. We often need plenty of text in the website, about 10,000 words of core content that’s unique and interesting. There are plenty of free content out there, but we can’t just copy a Wikipedia entry to our website. Content should be relevant to our business and audience. As an example, if we are selling home repair tools; we should also provide articles on how to use these tools efficiently.
Our websites should make extensive use of primary and relevant keywords. Optimizing search engines should be considered as an art. In this case, designers should understand the essence of keywords and they can be vital for optimizing search engines. So, if the website is designed for accounting professionals, we may need to use multiple relevant keywords, such as accounting services, accountancy, accountant and others. In Google, we could find thousands of accounting professionals who are looking for clients and it is important for use to compete with them. It means that we need strong content that can appeal to consumers.
Words should be composed in the right order. It is not only related to the body of the copy, but also page titles, headlines, sub-heading and tags. This is something that web designers should understand. It is often argued that meta tags are not as essentials as they used to. It is true that meta tags may not have a direct impact on our ranking. However, search engine bots still scan meta tags to know about the primary topics of our website. During early days of SEO, meta tags have been greatly abused by people who want to drive additional traffic to their website. Today, it is important for us to add proper keywords to avoid confusion. In fact, putting wrong keywords in our meta tages could dilute the impact of our primary keywords and this could result in lower ranks.
Text could be placed in hidden places, such as alt tags. In this case, images should have interesting names and alt tags. When our mouse pointer is placed on top of a picture, a text will be shown and they are alt tags. In this case, alt tags should improve the usability of our images. However, this could be something that’s easy to miss.
