Designing for SEO: 5 Basic Fundamentals

Designing for SEO: 5 Basic Fundamentals. A shiny, beautiful, brand-new website design is practically worthless without a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy powering it. After all, what’s the point of a website that no one can find? Online search is the biggest driver of traffic to websites, beating social media by 300%.

When doing web design with SEO in mind, you have several factors to consider (so make sure to hire someone professionally trained in SEO tactics for website design). Here are just a few SEO fundamentals to follow when designing your website:

1-Have clear header tags

While your page should be visually appealing, don’t neglect to include a clear header (<h1>). This will usually be the largest text on your page, and should be limited to one, placed near the top, and include the title of your post or page. This is what search engines use to identify how to categorize your page.

2-Have clear subhead tags

Much like header tags, your subhead (<h2> or <h3>) tags should be clearly placed after your page headline. Search engines like Google use this text to further identify how to sort your content in search results. Use these subheads to divide your content into blocks that your visitors can easily scan.

3-Use long-tail keywords whenever possible

While some companies aim to target short-tail (or, the most saturated or popular) key terms, others prefer to target long-tail keywords. These keywords are keywords that have less competition from other websites, but are still key terms that web visitors input into search engines. Do some research to discover your long-tail keywords and incorporate those into your headers and content.

4-Supplement images with text

Visuals are extremely important to the appeal of your website, but overusing images can be a big mistake when it comes to SEO. That’s because when search engines like Google crawl your website, they can’t “read” the images as they could with text (and therefore, it doesn’t know how to sort the information). Make sure to include text near the image or in dropdowns that correspond with what your image or offer is portraying.

5-Include social feedback

Incorporating social feedback into your website design can significantly boost your website’s SEO. Search engines appreciate you offering the opportunity for your visitors to engage with your website or comment on your website via other online social mediums. Adding a blog to your website is an easy way to both increase your SEO value and offer a source for feedback.

Not sure where to start with your SEO strategy? Contact SKYFALL BLUE and its SEO experts today to start gaining more traffic to your website through web design.