For any business that tries to make a success online, great web design is of high importance. However, not many people will notice your website if you don’t rank high in Google’s search engine. A good content strategy coupled with core principles of SEO can increase traffic to your website and make it more search engine friendly.

Here are some SEO tips to improve your web design without compromising your style and creativity.

1. Create Content that Can Be Easily Seen by Search Engine Spiders

Content is what gives life to a website. This is what every search engine feeds on. So make sure your content has a good structure (paragraphs, headings, links, etc.) when building a website.

Websites with insufficient or poor content struggle with traffic and are less likely to appear in search results. Proper web design planning can help avoid this. For instance, avoid using images for text if you don’t practice CSS image replacement.

2. Build and Maintain a Search Engine Friendly Website

If you don’t have a clear idea of how to design a crawler-friendly website while making Flash objects easy to access, then don’t add Flash to your website. That will make it tougher for search engines to crawl your website. Unobtrusive JavaScript and CSS can produce just about any fancy effect you’re looking for so that the search engine ranking is not sacrificed by any means.

3. Make Sure the Scripts Are Placed Outside HTML

Both CSS and JavaScript should be externalized when coding a website. This is because search engines see websites through what is included in HTML documents. Otherwise, your HTML documents will get multiple lines of code. These additional lines are usually added before the actual content. That can make it more difficult for search engines to crawl a website.

Google by Diego Velazquez

4. Determine Which Pages Should Be Indexed by Search Engines

Your website may contain some pages that you do not want to be indexed by search engines. This is especially true for pages that don’t add any value to the content, as is the case with server-side scripting. Additionally, this may refer to pages that are used to test out web design when building a new site. Make sure these pages are not exposed to web robots. They can dilute the density of your content and cause duplicate content problems to arise. As a result, your search ranking might drop.

To prevent search engines from indexing certain sections or pages on your website, create a Robots.txt file. It will make robots ignore specified directories or files while crawling your website.

5. Design URLs with Search Friendliness in Mind

Create search-friendly URLs that are easy to crawl. Make sure they contain keywords that explain or describe the page content. Pay attention to content management systems (CMS) that use special codes and auto-generated numbers for page URLs. A good CMS is the one that allows you to “prettify” and customize the URLs of your site.

Final Thoughts

While these tips and tricks can make your business website better, it’s best to hire a professional SEO agency to bring more traffic to your site. Digital marketing agencies can create a custom designed website according to any business needs. It is worth the extra cost.