When it comes to getting the most out of your webpage, you need to make sure that you design it to please both users and search engines. Making sure that your page ranks is best done by paying close attention to your user and accounting for search engine optimization (SEO).
This is the process in which you optimize your page to rank in search engines when people enter a query. By using keywords and trying to rank for material that they would be interested in, you make sure to drive traffic to your page and create a loyal customer base.
When you first design your page and while you maintain your page, you’ll want to consider a number of things and always factor in SEO. Here are a number of tips to help you establish – and upkeep – a great website for SEO in 2017:
Simple Navigation
First off, always consider that navigation is extremely important for both your users and search engines. This is how users will navigate your page, so you want to make it as easy as possible. More than that, this is how search engines will navigate your page too, as well as how they ‘crawl’ and ‘catalogue’ your pages as well. This is all important when search engines try to find results. The easier it is for search engines to catalogue your material, the better it will be indexed, and the more likely it is to be retrieved.
Be sure to create a sitemap for your page. Make it available to your users (in your footer is probably the best place). You also want to submit this to different search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo; simply submit this using the various Webmaster Tools offered by these search engines.
Reliable, Fast Speeds
Speed is one of the most important things for ranking your page effectively. Not only do users love fast pages, but search engines count this is a ranking factor as well. If you don’t have a fast page, the search engine will penalize you. On top of this, speed is one of the biggest things affecting your page’s bounce rate. This upsets users, but more importantly, a high bounce rate gives you more severe penalty from search engines. Making sure you have good speeds therefore directly and indirectly affects your page’s ability to rank. These can be complicated, so you may want to get information from professionals. I’ve relied on www.abovethefoldmedia.com for the past couple years now! Check them out yourselves.
Remember, it’s all about creating the best experience for your users. If you can do this, search engines will gradually rank you better. A great way to clean up your speeds by removing unnecessary and heavy elements such as JavaScript and Flash.
Mobile-Friendly Design
With Google’s recent update to their indexing system, which favors a mobile-friendly design, you’ll definitely need a mobile-responsive design. Without this, you won’t be ranking in the upcoming year.
If you already have a mobile-friendly version of your web page, you’ll want to invest more time and effort into these throughout 2017. Give them just as much – if not more – attention than your desktop versions and continue to invest the effort to have them running at top speeds and in the best condition.
It may seem easy, but these three simple steps can greatly improve your web pages SEO potential, drawing in more traffic.