Over the past few years, the scope of Web designing has broadened to a great extent.

Web Designers – Responsible for high SEO rankings

In the past, it was all about creating jaw dropping graphics and flash. But, with passage of time, web designer have understood that only beautiful websites can’t ensure continuous free traffic on it.

And that is why, a website design should not just look beautiful, but must also be SEO friendly to ensure its high rankings on Search Engines. So, a web designer, these days, often have to play a major role in handling the SEO responsibilities of a website. He also has to write, a major part of, front end code of a website.

Top 7 SEO tips for web designers

This makes the task of a web designer, more challenging and, important. However, if you are web designer, and don’t know much about SEO, then you must follow the following steps to create an SEO friendly design:

1. Provide a lot of space for your content

Original, and useful, content not just ensures high rankings, but also bring continuous free traffic

on your website. So you must not fill your website with graphics, and images, but must also provide a space to place some valuable content. Moreover, you must also provide the facility to update the content, from time to time.

2. Beware of Flash and Ajax

A lot of web designers are crazy about “Flash” and “Ajax”. Flash looks great on your website, no doubt, but is disastrous for its SEO. Search Engines crawlers can’t read flash files at all, resulting in very low rankings of your website on Search Engines.

Ajax, on the other hand, is not as bad as Flash. It is great to enhance the experience of your website’s users. But, never try to overdo it. The content created by Ajax, can’t be linked to, and thus is not good for the SEO of your website.

You should keep your website, as simple as possible, in order to ensure high rankings, and continuous free traffic.

3. Don’t replace headings with images

As designers, we always want our website to look more attractive. And in order to improve the appearance of a website, a lot of designers remove “text headings” with beautiful, and attractive, images. And, this is disastrous for the SEO of your website. The text in your heading tags, if effective, can improve the SEO rankings of your website.

However, you can also go for Fahrner Image Replacement. It is a technique that uses CSS to replace your content with the image containing that content.

4. Use of Images

Images are necessary not just to improve the overall look of your website, but to also increase the interest of your users in it. But, make sure that every image, on your website, is accompanied by a relevant ALT tag. This is essential as search engines can’t see an image, they can only read it. And the text in your ALT tag helps them to know, what your image is all about. You must also include relevant keywords in it.

In addition to this, you must also name your images properly. Also, make sure to place important keywords in the name of your images.

5. Avoid using Splash Page

Now, what’s a splash page? It is a welcome page, or landing page, that appears before you see the home page. A lot of designers love to create a splash page to show off their designing skills. Even, some webmasters love the idea of having a splash page. After all, it looks damn attractive, and stylish.

So, whats the problem with it? Well, Google Spiders take it for your actual home page, and thus it badly affects the rankings of your website. In addition to this, splash page normally is designed with flash, and have no text on it. Thus, it doesn’t result in high rankings of your website.

Plus, a lot of users find it very annoying. They want websites to be simple, and normal.

6. Consistent URL & specific links

You must be sure about the URL you want to keep for your website – http://yourdomain.com  or  www.yourname.com. And, once you make your decision, stick to it. In the above example, Search Engines see both these URL’s (with and without www) as two separate websites. It will divide your rankings between both the URL’s, which would not be good for your website. You must use .htaccess file to remove this confusion.

In addition to this, you must also place specific, and relevant, keywords in your anchor links. This would ensure high rankings of your website. You must never go for “generic” links like – “read more” or “click this” – when you are linking to an another website.

7. Improve Page Loading Speed

The loading time of your website is one of the factors that Google considers, while computing its Search Engine rankings.

Using a lot of Images,Videos, Flash or Heavy Graphics in your website can slow down its speed. You must try to keep your website simple, and light. Even, including Google Ads on your website’s home page can reduce its speed.

I still remember, the moment I removed Google Ads from my website’s home page, the  loading time of my website improved considerably.

In addition to this, make sure that your website is properly optimized. You can easily find a lot of tools to check your website’s speed, and find the weak areas to improve it further.

Thus, it is important that your website design is not just beautiful, but SEO friendly, to ensure continuous free traffic on your website. I hope you liked the above tips to create an SEO friendly website design. If you have something to add to it, feel free to share it with us.