Premium website design with SEO in mind is a crucial aspect of business for any online company. If a website isn’t optimized to rank for keywords in search, then the chances are slim that many people will ever even see your content.
Your website’s marketing strategy can reach its highest potential if your SEO strategy is aligned with your web strategy. In one survey, approximately 61% of marketers said that improving SEO and increasing their organic presence was among the top priorities of 2017. The key to good SEO is to build your custom website with Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) in mind.
Google accounts for more than 90% of global organic search traffic, and by following a few standard SEO practices, you can improve your custom built website’s ranking in Google SERPs and draw more traffic to your site. Keep reading to learn some of the best SEO tips for premium website design.
Never Use Flash for Site Navigation
Search engines like google have a hard time reading Flash, and unless you’ve optimized your Flash elements to be easily crawled, it can affect your rank in search. Flash is something that’s best avoided altogether. Just don’t use it.
CSS and JavaScript can be used to create all types of fancy effects without sacrificing your search engine rankings.
Keep it Simple
Simple URLs are user friendly and they make Google’s bots happy when they crawl your pages. By using simple keyword optimized URLs that are unique to the content of each page, it not only helps keep your site’s structure simple and easy to navigate for users, it also makes it easier for Google to index the pages on your site.
Encode CSS and Java Outsite of the HTML Document
Search engines view a website through what’s contained in the HTML document. An HTML document is a file which contains Hypertext Markup Language that can be displayed in a web browser. Essentially, an HTML document is a text document that a web browser can read and then render on the screen.
When you are coding your website, it’s important to externalize JavaScript and CSS. CSS and Java can add additional lines of text to the HTML document which can negatively affect the load time of the web page. Search engines like to get to the content of a website as quickly as possible and if your page loads too slowly, it may have an effect on your site’s rank in search.
Tell Google Which Pages Not to Index
If there are pages on your site that you don’t want search engines to index, such as server-side scripts or test pages that may otherwise impact your search ranking, you need to tell Google not to crawl them. The best way to prevent certain web pages from being indexed by search engine crawlers is to use a robots.txt file.
Robots.txt is a text file that is designed to instruct search bots how to crawl pages on a website. These files essentially tell search engines which pages on a site that they can and cannot crawl.
These are just a few important factors to take into consideration for your premium website design. And even more in-depth articles on the topic are just a Google search away. If you are in over your head and unsure of where to begin, or have no experience with premium website design or professional SEO, it may be a good idea to contact an SEO website design company for help.