6 SEO Tips for Web Designers

You are taking your first steps in the world of web design, your goal is to create sites or blogs with spectacular graphics, right? Mistaken. Or at least it is only partially. The aesthetic side of a web project is not the only aspect you will have to deal with.

On the other hand, the platform you are working on must be easily found by the people who use the main search engines. And this is where SEO comes into play: the set of techniques that aim at optimizing content to make it visible on Google.

What are your thoughts about SEO? I am a designer, it shouldn’t interest me! “. In reality, SEO and web design go hand in hand and there are many factors that you should optimize when designing a website.

Would you like to know more? Here are 6 SEO tips you (perhaps) don’t know.

Optimize images

A web designer worthy of the name knows that good positioning also depends on the SEO optimization of the images. In addition, searching for images has become a widespread practice.

For this reason, if you want your content to position you must improve the photos and images on the SEO side. Let’s see what the characteristics to be respected are:

• Name of the images: must be contextualized to the page of the website or blog. Writing: “sample.jpg” will not help you find yourself.
• Alt attribute: is the description of the photo. This feature is very important for scaling Google SERP. In this space, I suggest (without exaggerating) to insert words or key phrases. However, the alt tag is also decisive for accessibility, it is read by vocal readers for people with visual impairments.
• Optimize the weight of the images: this factor, if neglected, affects the speed of the website and leads to negative results also from the point of view of SEO positioning. The imperative is to use light images and therefore always remember to reduce the size of photos.

The attention to these details increases the relevance of the page and the search by image. As a result, you have a better chance of a person identifying your photo as useful content and becoming loyal to your site.

Keep the code clean

Here is another of the SEO tips that a web designer must know: The site you are designing must-have crystal clear and orderly code.

Do you know why? Clean code is scanned smoothly by Google crawlers. From this situation to benefit not only the Search engine optimization but also the speed of loading.

Reduce flash elements in menus

It is not advisable to abuse flash solutions to create navigation menus. The reason is simple: perhaps they are not the best in terms of aesthetics and the search engines have difficulty reading them.

Result? You would encounter some SEO indexing problems.

A good middle ground, if you really can’t do without it, would be to use only small flash parts on a platform built with HTML code.

To understand why flash technologies have a bad influence on SEO take a look at this article.

Watch out for the URL

This is another of the SEO tips for web designers, URL optimization. That is the address of a page or internet resource. Why is it so important to optimize this text string?

It is one of the elements used by search engines to position a site or blog. So make sure you don’t leave the URL to chance.

Examples like this: “index.php? Lan = it & cat = 8 & id = 45” must not exist, do not refer to useful information for Google and readers. What you need to do is turn the series of numbers and symbols into words.

There are good practices that you can put in place:

• Include the keyword in the URL;
• The URL must be short;
• Use dashes to divide words;
• If necessary, delete the stop words: all those superfluous words to the main ones. I’m talking to you about possessive articles or adjectives.

Generate the sitemap

The sitemap is, in fact, a site map and is used to make its structure understood. It is a file that collects in an orderly way all the pages that must be indexed on search engines.

I leave you with the words of Google: “A sitemap is a file in which you can list the web pages of your site to communicate to Google and other search engines the organization of the contents of the site. So-called web crawlers from search engines like Googlebot read these files to better scan your site. ”

CMS have valid tools to create the sitemap to be inserted in the Google Search Console. Once generated, for example with one of the many WordPress plugins, you just have to send it to the search engine.

The structure of the text

The last of the SEO tips for web designers? Organize content with hierarchical headers.

These elements are used to divide the text into sections. The H2 refers to the title while the H2 is the title of the paragraphs. Then, there are the H3, H4, H5 and H6 which indicate subsections, but are little used. A well-structured text helps the search engine find the most important information on the page.

SEO tips for web designers: your experience

These are just some SEO tips for web designers. Tips that want to meet the needs of Google but also of readers who can enjoy quality content.

Author Bio:

Andy Roger belongs to the finance department and he is working with a well-known company where he supports to Get Tech Business Licence in Abu Dhabi. He also writes articles on a different niche to share his experience with the world.