Finding A Balance Between SEO and Amazing Website Design
As a freelance web designer in Delhi, question like finding the balance between SEO and website design that is amazing sometimes come up in conversation with clients. First, we need to understand what SEO is and how it benefits website design as a whole to make it rank better on search engines. It is not enough to have one without the other hence, there is to be a balance between them.
JP Morgan and Co have summarized this by stating that in the Era of internet customers service, it is imperative that you know that your competitor is only one mouse click away. Gone are the days where the focus on web design all revolves round colors where you put in the effort to see that your website design is popping. Today, it goes more than just colors, making your website user-friendly and SEO optimized goes a long way in making it rank better. If the balance between your website design and SEO is established, you will notice that you end up ranking well and even better on search engines. There are several things to consider for the balance between SEO and website design:
1. Knowing When it is a Necessity
The cool thing about SEO is that it is specific to a particular page. Each page ranks for its own content. Although, not all pages of a website usually rank which is fine. You only want the important pages to rank. The reason why a page exist will determine whether you want it to be SEO optimized or not. Take for example, if the page is supposed to be dedicated to advertising thus serving as a landing page, then the focus has to be drifted away from being an SEO optimized page but rather emphasis will be on user experience thus keeping the page simple so it appeals to different user. If the page is supposed to rank organically, then it is important to make it SEO optimized and also user friendly.
2. Site Navigation
Most times, website designer focus on overall appearance in terms of the look and feel as well as user experience but for SEO purpose, there is need to focus on the website navigation. As a freelance web designer in Delhi and other web designers, the focus is always on the visual elements of a website page and how users interact with these visual elements. With this, it is obvious that designers like to keep this simple while also making the site look beautiful especially now that reports have shown that mobile users are far more than those that make use of desktops. But SEO expert will advice that designers need to focus on navigation ease for optimization on search engines.
3. Discovery
Before now, what web designers usually look forward to is getting noticed by their designs standing out with bright and bold visual elements. But now, the quest is to get discovered by search engines. It is no longer enough for a website to be beautiful, a user should be able to easily find what they are looking for. Having the right amount of content that the user is looking for and can also make it rank better is what every designer is aiming at. The content of a site helps in the ranking of that site by user search queries. For a website to be relevantly discovered on a particular search query, there is need to be a great balance between the visual elements of the site and the content available on that site relating to the query.
4. Size of Website Pages
One habit common to web developers is the use of tabs, spaces, annotations etc. for the sole purpose of increasing the readability of the code. But however, doing this increases the size of web pages and thus resulting in the delay it takes these pages to load. Modification of these codes becomes important and with the use of tools like GruntJS, the unnecessary elements are removed and thus making sure the size of the web page is greatly reduced for better SEO optimization.
5. Number of http Calls
There are several reasons why the number of http calls in a website is much. One thing a web developer has to put in mind is that the number of http calls have to be greatly reduced for a particular website to be greatly optimized. Making sure that several CSS files and JS files are bundled together to a single file will greatly reduce the number of http calls on that site. Doing this with a task runner tool like GruntJS will help bundle the several CSS and JS file into one file so that with a reduced number of http calls, the web pages will be able to load faster as opposed to when there are several http calls to make.
CSS and JS are not the only element to consider in order to reduce the number of http calls, considering the site images as well is also important. This is possible by merging multiple images into one single image called sprite. Doing this allows for sprite to be called as many times as possible whenever it is needed as opposed to calling different images which increases the number of http calls.
Another element that also affect http calls is the font. Although, the type of font being used by a site makes that site attractive or not. As a freelance web designer in Delhi, they believe is every designer knows that fancy fonts enhance the overall appearance of a website. However, the downside to this is that such fancy fonts can make the website load very slowly. To avoid multiple http calls, which makes website load pages very slowly, it is important to merge or bundle these multiple fonts. Doing this help reduce the number of http calls thus making the website load faster and optimized.
Summary
Finding a balance between SEO and amazing website design is very much achievable by considering the points listed above when developing a website. If different teams are involved, that is, a separate team for the design of a site and a separate team for SEO of the same site, then, there is need for a great coordination between these two teams. Whatever change need to be done by the web design team should be carried out right from start of the project and not after the project to avoid complexity. Doing this will make the project run smoothly without hiccups thus achieving the whole goal of the project in a timely manner.
Author Bio:
I’m writing Website designing content from last 3 years. I have written content on many high authority websites like Hashnode, Hackernoon, CodeCondo and many more website designing sites. If you have any question regarding website design feel free to contact me.