7 Ways to Design a Great-Looking Website that Ranks Well

In October 2019, Google rolled out its Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) update to better understand searches. The tech giant said this change would impact the search rankings as well as the snippets featured in the results. With this update, search engine optimization (SEO) has become more valuable and powerful than ever. 

There are more than 1.94 billion websites in the world and all are striving for first-page ranking. For a website to rank higher, SEO plays a critical role. From informative content to user experience (UX) design, everything in a website accounts for optimization that relies on SEO.

While SEO is often associated with the relevancy and originality of the content, it is also associated with the overall design and the whole website aesthetics. Sometimes SEO is as basic as, ranking better because your title has the recommended length and the suitable keyword (that describes your content best), and sometimes it’s very technical. Here’s what you need to know:

Understanding User Interface (UI), User Experience (UX) and SEO

The link between UI and SEO isn’t as far-fetched an idea as you might think. Here’s the thing; when a user enters the keywords in the search engine, the websites optimized for content, design, and accessibility appear in the search engine rankings pages (SERPs). The user clicks and is directed to the site. When they find it hard to access what they need, or encounter some usability dysfunction, they leave the site too soon and the overall purpose of the site distorts. 

On the other hand, when SEO overlaps the look and feel of the site, it impacts your website’s UX. If the design is laden with unnecessary elements, the search engine crawlers might have trouble accessing the information buried underneath. If the look and feel of the website doesn’t align with optimization principles, the rank on the SERPs ultimately drops. 

The key to implementing strong SEO is to organize the content along with its usability, functionality, and accessibility to shape the overall user interaction. Once the design aligns with accessible features that have been properly optimized, there’s no way the Google bots can ditch the on-point answer you’ve included on your site.

Here Are 7 Tips For A Well-Optimized Website

SEO and UI/UX intertwine. One needs to design a website that embraces SEO and implements as per the Google guidelines and other search engine practices. While you go through the following tips, remember that it’s all about the human on the other end of the search engine. 

1. Create A Simple Website Architecture 

For one thing, a website’s architecture helps SEO big time. If the structure and layout of the elements are simple, search engine crawlers can switch from one page to the other fast, and index those pages as they go. It will help your links pass on from all kinds of sites. 

The design you offer your readers must display seamless navigation, clear information labels, limited inner pages, and clever call-to-actions (CTAs). 

2. Design For Accessibility 

A website with poorly designed features will only repel the users, affecting the conversion rates and search engine ranking. Your website must be easy to find on all kinds of browsers and flexible enough for all sorts of users. Moreover, if your website is slow to load or keeps crashing, your new visitors will leave the website sooner than the page loading time. All of these practices hurt your site SEO. 

Make sure to avoid chunks of texts, hidden links, flash elements, and other heavy elements that obstruct the visitors from using the site.

3. Optimize The Visuals

SEO has started deeply affecting other elements on websites and not just the text. SEO also integrates into different forms of visuals to improve the ranking. Good web design accounts for high-quality images and videos used across the whole website. However, optimizing these for SEO is equally important and you should start optimizing even before the launch, on your coming soon page.

If you’re using visuals in your web design, make sure you’ve optimized them first. The best bit is that you can use several tools to keep your visuals optimized without losing the overall quality. Also, make sure that the images you’re using reflect the website intent. 

4. Increase The Page-Loading Speed 

What good is web design if it can’t load properly? Your SEO efforts receive serious backlash if the page loading speed takes more than three seconds. Even if your page speed is delayed by a second, the reviews drop down to 11%. Moreover, it hurts your conversion rates as well as the user experience. 

In that case, improving your page speed is the only option to save the incoming possible conversions. You can increase the page speed by selecting a reliable web host, choosing high-quality compressed images, removing the auto play videos, and employing content delivery networks.  

5. Incorporate Social Media Buttons In The Design

SEO supports web designs equipped with social media sharing options. The reason is that increasing the sharing opportunities within your web page helps your content gain visibility that SEO can’t possibly ignore. 

When designing your page, make sure you integrate social media buttons on every page, except your landing pages when you want your customer to fill out a form. 

6. Reduce The JavaScript Burden 

Using JavaScript on every page of your website negatively affects your chances for ranking high. When a website goes live, the crawlers go deep and run a scan for indexing in the SERPs list. However, loads of JavaScript causes crawling issues, which fail the indexing procedure. What’s more, JavaScript isn’t the best idea if you’re going for a mobile-first approach. 

Using JavaScript won’t cause too much damage if you’re using it sparingly and not on every page. So the more simple you keep your web pages and the more you reduce the JavaScript load, the quicker you’ll see an instant improvement. Watch out for the a positive impact on several factors like page speed, optimization and responsiveness. 

7. Improve Website Responsiveness 

Another thing included in the recent SEO updates is the prioritization of mobile-based indexing. Just because your site is optimized for desktop doesn’t mean it will be optimized for mobile too. You need to develop a responsive version of your website that can compete for the traffic on mobile.

It’s best to use a large, readable font and eliminate extra elements. Make sure you place the CTAs in favorable positions with clickable options. 

Set SEO Aside, You Be The Judge 

For some time now, SEO has been the main reasoning behind UI/UX design. Up until the most recent update to Google’s algorithms it’s clear that a holistic approach, that aligns all your factors in one lane, is ideal. You need to do the necessary that results in a highly-optimized web design. 

If you find it hard to manage, employ the service and skills of a reliable web design company in Dallas. This will help you increase the prospects of your products and services. If you keep it user-centric, there’s a higher chance you’d be able to enjoy greatly increased traffic, satisfied visitors, and better customer relationships.