It's not easy to make a website that is search engine optimized and also has a great looking design. Many site owners tend to make compromises to the design of their site since getting traffic is more important in the big picture. The truth is that you can do both. You can create a seamless look for your site or blog while still optimizing it for the search engines. Here are some great tips for accomplishing this.
Use CSS to Manipulate Your Text
Trying to use SEO tags like the header tags can really hurt the look of your site. The h1 and h2 tags will display a text size that will make your headers and subheads look misplaced. Fortunately, this can be resolved with the use of CSS. By defining the font, style, size, color and other elements in your CSS file for your header tags, your text will use the settings of the CSS file. This can be done for other parts of your page like your sidebars, navigation menu and footers.
Plan Out the Structure Before You Build Your Site
It's important that you group together related pages under the right categories to create themes for your site. That helps the search engines determine what your pages are about. Unfortunately, many people make a website without planning out its structure. Start by using the Google Keyword Planner to research keywords you're going to be targeting for a few days. Then, think about what kind of content that you're going to create around those keywords and establish categories for these pages. Not going through this process can make it difficult to organize your site later on.
Put Effort into Designing Your Content
Designing your content is a concept that most people are not familiar with. There are many things that you can do to enhance the look of search engine optimized content. Start by using stylish web fonts to add a unique look to your content. Text created through graphic design usually looks better than standard text. But using a web font from a database like Google Fonts can really amp up the look of regular text. Then you want to create a visual hierarchy for your content so that it's easy to follow while still being SEO friendly. Add visual cues, engaging formatting, supplementary images and varying text to keep the user engaged.
Use the Related and Popular Post Widgets
When you create a new page of content, you want it to be indexed in the search engines as soon as possible. This can take some time if your pages are buried deep in your website. To get past this issue, you can simply use plugins to set up content widgets. These widgets can display related and popular posts throughout your site, allowing the search engine spiders to find all your pages. You will also want to use breadcrumb links to link your pages together. These links have an added bonus of being user friendly as well.
Put Emphasis on Mobile Friendly Design
Being mobile friendly is important to ranking well in Google. The easiest way to seamlessly make your site or blog mobile friendly is to use responsive design. There are many themes and templates that are responsive, so it's easy to get up and running. However, there are many little things that you'll need to do like rearranging your navigation menu, compressing image and making web buttons easy to click on small screens. These things may not necessarily affect search engine rankings but it affects whether or not the user stays on your site.
Optimize for Faster Site Loading Times
Did you know that the loading speed of your site is a ranking factor? While you may want to use high quality images and large multimedia files, you want to keep it to a minimum and leave it to users to decide if they want to load up these large files. There are many things that you can do from optimizing image sizes, enabling site compression, setting up a cloud network, to using browser caching. There are also tricks you can use like loading certain elements of your website first. Fast loading speeds also enhances the user experience which is an important part of web design.
Use the Right Plugins to Assess Your On-page Optimization
It can be difficult to ensure that your pages has the proper on-page optimization in place. There are many plugins that can make your job easier. Yoast SEO is the most recognized plugin. It will look at everything including your title, image alt tags, header tags and keyword density. It also lets you control your robots.txt file, create sitemaps, optimize your RSS feed for your blog, integrate social share buttons, and more. There are also plugins that will help you create content easier and integrate related keywords so that your content can perform better in the search engines.
See How the Search Engines View Your Site
At the end of the day, you may be satisfied with how your website or blog looks to your visitors. But are you aware of how the search engines view your site? You can use Browseo to see if your website is thin on content, presents the wrong elements first or is riddled with errors. For example, many site owners find that their top navigation menu or footer is read first by the search engines. In this case, they'd have to go back to change up their CSS and make sure their main content is being read first by the search engines.
As you can see, creating a great looking site that seamlessly is search engine optimized is not complex. The fundamentals really come down to site speed, proper CSS usage, planned site structure and a mobile friendly site. At the same time, you may need the help of an experienced designer that knows how to design for SEO when you're creating the CSS files. The thing to take away here is that you don't have to make big compromises to the look of your site to make it search engine friendly.
Use CSS to Manipulate Your Text
Trying to use SEO tags like the header tags can really hurt the look of your site. The h1 and h2 tags will display a text size that will make your headers and subheads look misplaced. Fortunately, this can be resolved with the use of CSS. By defining the font, style, size, color and other elements in your CSS file for your header tags, your text will use the settings of the CSS file. This can be done for other parts of your page like your sidebars, navigation menu and footers.
Plan Out the Structure Before You Build Your Site
It's important that you group together related pages under the right categories to create themes for your site. That helps the search engines determine what your pages are about. Unfortunately, many people make a website without planning out its structure. Start by using the Google Keyword Planner to research keywords you're going to be targeting for a few days. Then, think about what kind of content that you're going to create around those keywords and establish categories for these pages. Not going through this process can make it difficult to organize your site later on.
Put Effort into Designing Your Content
Designing your content is a concept that most people are not familiar with. There are many things that you can do to enhance the look of search engine optimized content. Start by using stylish web fonts to add a unique look to your content. Text created through graphic design usually looks better than standard text. But using a web font from a database like Google Fonts can really amp up the look of regular text. Then you want to create a visual hierarchy for your content so that it's easy to follow while still being SEO friendly. Add visual cues, engaging formatting, supplementary images and varying text to keep the user engaged.
Use the Related and Popular Post Widgets
When you create a new page of content, you want it to be indexed in the search engines as soon as possible. This can take some time if your pages are buried deep in your website. To get past this issue, you can simply use plugins to set up content widgets. These widgets can display related and popular posts throughout your site, allowing the search engine spiders to find all your pages. You will also want to use breadcrumb links to link your pages together. These links have an added bonus of being user friendly as well.
Put Emphasis on Mobile Friendly Design
Being mobile friendly is important to ranking well in Google. The easiest way to seamlessly make your site or blog mobile friendly is to use responsive design. There are many themes and templates that are responsive, so it's easy to get up and running. However, there are many little things that you'll need to do like rearranging your navigation menu, compressing image and making web buttons easy to click on small screens. These things may not necessarily affect search engine rankings but it affects whether or not the user stays on your site.
Optimize for Faster Site Loading Times
Did you know that the loading speed of your site is a ranking factor? While you may want to use high quality images and large multimedia files, you want to keep it to a minimum and leave it to users to decide if they want to load up these large files. There are many things that you can do from optimizing image sizes, enabling site compression, setting up a cloud network, to using browser caching. There are also tricks you can use like loading certain elements of your website first. Fast loading speeds also enhances the user experience which is an important part of web design.
Use the Right Plugins to Assess Your On-page Optimization
It can be difficult to ensure that your pages has the proper on-page optimization in place. There are many plugins that can make your job easier. Yoast SEO is the most recognized plugin. It will look at everything including your title, image alt tags, header tags and keyword density. It also lets you control your robots.txt file, create sitemaps, optimize your RSS feed for your blog, integrate social share buttons, and more. There are also plugins that will help you create content easier and integrate related keywords so that your content can perform better in the search engines.
See How the Search Engines View Your Site
At the end of the day, you may be satisfied with how your website or blog looks to your visitors. But are you aware of how the search engines view your site? You can use Browseo to see if your website is thin on content, presents the wrong elements first or is riddled with errors. For example, many site owners find that their top navigation menu or footer is read first by the search engines. In this case, they'd have to go back to change up their CSS and make sure their main content is being read first by the search engines.
As you can see, creating a great looking site that seamlessly is search engine optimized is not complex. The fundamentals really come down to site speed, proper CSS usage, planned site structure and a mobile friendly site. At the same time, you may need the help of an experienced designer that knows how to design for SEO when you're creating the CSS files. The thing to take away here is that you don't have to make big compromises to the look of your site to make it search engine friendly.
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