A Guide to Website Design
In order to make your website a success, you need to impress the visitors. And you need to impress them at the first sight. If visitors of your website like what they see, they are more likely to take a few moments to see what you have to say or/and offer, and perhaps make a purchase. But if they don’t like your website at a first glance, they are highly likely to click “back” button and go to your competition. In order to prevent this from happening, you need a good website design.
Good Looking Website Design Not Enough to Persuade the Visitors
If you want to catch the visitors’ attention, you need an attractive website design that stands out from the crowd. However, you can have the coolest design on the web but you won’t achieve the desired response from the visitors of your website if it lacks user-friendly navigation for instance. It would be just like giving them a Rolls Royce without a steering wheel.
The Connection Between Website Design and SEO
Why You Need to Impress Search Engines
The main purpose of online presence is to reach as many people as possible because the more people you reach the more likely you are to make a sale. But in order to attract large number of people to your website, you firstly need to impress major search engines because the vast majority of traffic is generated via search engines. And the higher your website is ranked in search engine results pages (SERP), the more visitors it will receive. The process of improving a website’s SERP ranking, known as search engine optimisation (SEO) involves the use of a number of tools and techniques but it also involves the use of search engine-friendly website design.
Search Engine-Friendly Web Design Explained
In order for search engines to be able to recognise the value of your website, it needs to have search engine-friendly coding and structure, META tags and META descriptions to make it easier for web spiders to “read” the content of the website, internal linking, etc.. Of course your website also needs unique and quality content that remains king when it comes to SEO. But if you want the search engines to say “hey, this website/page offers high value” and rank it higher in SERP, the overall design must make it easy for their spiders to crawl, read and collect the content. If they can’t do that for any reason whether it is improper coding or an error, they won’t direct their users to your website.
Website Design and Organic SEO
Website design also plays an important role in the so-called organic SEO that is proved to be the most effective of all SEO strategies and to deliver long lasting results. Why? Because an attractive yet user-friendly design makes the visitors more likely to stay on your website for a few minutes and recognise its value. This doesn’t only make them more likely to return and make a purchase but it also makes them more likely to leave backlinks to your website on other relevant websites. And these links have a huge value in the eyes of search engines as they see them as an indicator of popularity of your website among the users and subsequently, rank it higher on SERP.