Does the design of your website really have an impact on the visitors or traffic it will get?
Most people take traffic generation and web design to be different online marketing activities that should be handled separately. However, the two activities intertwine and should complement each other to help you achieve your sales, branding or lead generation objectives.
How your website is designed can determine whether or not it will be easily found on Google and other search engines. Therefore, when looking to create a new website or have your current one redesigned, you should choose an agency that knows the relationship between design and traffic.
In particular, you want to work with a design agency that provides full online marketing services. The agency should know the best practices of web design to ensure your website will be easily accessible. Moreover, the design team should work together with the search engine optimization (SEO) team to ensure the site adheres to Google’s best practices on optimization, will be easily found by search engine robots, and can rank high for your target keywords.
By working with an agency that understands the relationship between website design and traffic, you can be sure to get a high-impact site that generates leads and sales. Below are six ways in which web design can affect your site’s traffic.
1. Use Navigation Links
Navigation links makes it easy for visitors to quickly find the content they are looking for at your website. By designing your website with a proper navigation structure, visitors will stay on your page longer consuming your content.
Having navigation links and using breadcrumbs also helps your website get crawled faster by search engine robots. For SEO purposes, your site’s navigation links should be text-based rather than image-based. Also, avoid using JavaScript in the links. While JavaScript can provide some cool effects, it can inhibit your SEO efforts.
2. Provide Great Content
Content drives the web and generates traffic most of the natural traffic to your website. Creating content that is helpful and that resonates well with your target audience is the first step towards establishing your brand online. You can create different types of content for your audience. For example, you may wish to create blog posts, videos, eBooks, or podcasts, among other types of content.
When creating your website, the developer should keep in mind the kind of content you plan on sharing. For example, if you will be providing podcasts and videos, the website will have to be optimized to load the videos quickly. This improves the user experience and boosts your SEO rating.
3. Avoid Flash Elements
While Flash animations may make your website look beautiful, the content can inhibit search engines from reading your website content. Google bots do not read Flash elements and if your website is purely made of Flash, it will be difficult to get it to rank high on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
If you would like to have animations on your website, there are other alternatives that will help to make your site ‘findable’ by search engines. For example, HTML 5 videos are a great alternative to Flash. Apart from being more secure, they are also search-engine friendly. This means you can have the sleek website with animations that you want without having to worry of your site not being found by search engines.
4. Code with On-page SEO
While it is activities like link building that contribute greatly to a website’s ranking on search engine results pages, on-page optimization techniques are also important. Your website designer should understand on-page SEO optimization and code your website based on them. Here are a few things to the designer should keep in mind:
The website content should be formatted correctly with Title, H1 and Meta tags.
Any images or videos on the website should be optimized with keyword-rich Alt tags.
Interlinking website content is important to helping search engines find the website.
When coding, bad SEO practices like keyword stuffing, hidden text and methods of gaining search engine bots should be avoided.
5. Enable Social Sharing
Social media has become an important part of SEO today. While there is debate whether Google considers social signals (i.e. likes, shares, tweets, etc.) from different sites when ranking websites, there is no debate that social media sites can be as source of traffic to your website.
Make sure your website has been integrated with social media sharing buttons to make it easy for your readers to share your content with other people in their networks. If you are using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress for your blog, there are a number of plugins that can easily add social media sharing buttons on your website.
Ideally, you should have sharing buttons of the platforms where your ideal customers hang out.
6. Share Content on Your Blog
In today’s competitive world, you need to have a blog on your website. Whether your website is built on a content management system or is static, you should incorporate a blog in it. Integrating a blog is easy and will not require major design changes on your website.
A blog gives you the opportunity to interact with your readers and educate them on your products or services. By blogging consistently, you can establish your website to be a hub of resources in your industry. Moreover, blogging also helps to improve your website’s ranking on search engine results pages.
