The connection between web design and SEO – With technological advancement, web use also increases and changes. And that brings about a change in the SEO best practices as well. Today, web designers have access to evolved technologies than before. And now that we have stepped into 2020, there are more web design and SEO changes expected.
It is always beneficial to keep a tab of some SEO considerations about website design trends, that comprises of the HTML5, responsive, and parallax design. Most website designers want to integrate all these options when they think it’s apt. But most designers know that the site accessibility and site architecture will stay as the primary SEO concerns.
Web designers have realized that they must design a website to keep the end-user requests in mind. It helps to enhance the SEO ranks. To know more about this, you can check out https://www.bigdropinc.com/.
The essential website design trends
The parallax design places the web content on the webpage, right in front of the user. And it is a smart way to direct the user using a storytelling technique. Most of the websites today are working towards using a parallax storytelling format, as it enhances the conversion rates. Even though the storytelling format is easy for the customer, but it can impose some issues from the SEO point of view. Having a website with just one page makes it challenging to make the most of the SEO best practices. But still, website designers like the parallax design format and suggests other developing more than one-page websites. Also, if it’s possible, you might feel like integrating a couple of parallax design pages to enhance the website experience.
The responsive web design also brings forth a few essential SEO considerations that web designers should look into. For instance, a single URL might restrict the capacity to segment the target keyword to those keywords that are apt for mobile users.
The advantages and uses of responsive website design
Google suggests website designers adopt responsive design as a recommended process for designing several devices. Today, you will have ample user experience benefits here. You can work with innovative and experimental website design concepts with ease. The essential SEO benefit of this design is that it doesn’t dilute the link equity. It means that a responsive web design provides you a URL for the primary and mobile site. And that allows helps the SEO experts to work better for maximizing the external backlink count to every page and driving links in two different URLs. There are switchboard tags that many people use! But not all web designers are comfortable in using the same.
Considerations while using HTML5
HTML5 is a successful advancement in web design. However, implementing the same can trouble SEO practices. HTML5 design is inspirational, interactive, and fantastic. However, if it doesn’t get coded correctly, Google will find an empty page.
Several websites integrate all the visually stunning aspects from HTML5 coding, integrate JavaScript as well. And that makes it challenging for the search engine bots to comprehend the content. It might also highlight static content, which can represent the HTML5 content for the bots to index the website better. But there are a few web developers who take ample time to come up with a few static versions of the content for the searching bots. A
The connection between web design and cognitive dissonance
The concept of cognitive dissonance believes that people have the urge to minimize dissonance for generating control and consistency. It helps to match the expectations with reality. Based on this concept, as and when people can’t do this, they will avert everything that suggests they have no control.
It means, when a website provides excess choices, the end users might feel disconnected! According to the cognitive dissonance theory, when a site isn’t easily navigable and offers excess choices, the end-user can leave the site. Negotiating might appear extremely chaotic. Do you want your users to have an excellent website experience? If yes, then you need to allow the user experience and data to drive the design. When you do the same, you can make sure that you aren’t alienating the target customers.
SEO professionals should learn about cognitive dissonance a well. There’s a chance of this taking place at the keyword-to-landing page level. The keywords that you optimize should match your landing page experience, as a user would expect it to. Hence, the web design and SEO experts suggest it is essential to sort the SEO entry pages timely by the bounce rates. You might start with web pages having the most bounce rate and also double check on the search keyword type, which generated web traffic to those web pages. It gets done for ensuring that the entry page offers a sufficient response to the best entry keywords. Now since the keywords don’t get provided 100%, it can still get accomplished by assessing the keywords from search engines as a smart proxy.
A justifiable surfer patent
While designing the web pages for the end-user, web designers should think of Google’s reasonable surfer patent. Based on this patent, one of the essential links and frequently clicked links pass an increased internal page rank. It indicates that just in case you’ve decided to make modifications to your website’s primary navigation or you shift the visible links to a less visible location, the ranking might reduce. It is one example that provides SEO and web design to share a close association.
There are several cases where web design options can affect SEO initiatives! Several website design trends suggest that website architecture and accessibility are still essential considerations. It is necessary to develop and deliver web pages that provides clarity to the users, instead of confusing them. Website pages should lead the customers to the links, sub-categories, and categories so that they can access the content which they require. Developing the website pages keeping the objective of the end-users in mind, and blending it with the best web design practices is a complete win-win.
Things that need correction
So, are there any web design practice that comes in between digital marketing strategies? There are a few that hinder findability, usability, readability, crawlability, and accessibility. And when this happens, it becomes challenging for the SEO to come up with the best strategies. Some of the issues are as follows:
Navigation problems
- Problems with the mega menu.
- The hamburger menu which isn’t intuitive.
- Making use of search for developing categories than filters.
- Accordion navigation.
- The dropdown navigation aspects that don’t link the main category and compels the SEO to select a sub-category.
Design issues
- The presence of an indefinite scroll.
- Huge images right atop the pages.
- Not adding the alt text choice for uploading images.
- Making use of font-awesome in place of the SVG fonts.
- Sluggish redirects.
- When the sliders make the pages slow because of pictures from sliders must load first.
- When the site redesign choices get made without any analytical consulting. The inappropriate decisions get made depending on opinions instead of depending on the information.
- Placing the site logo as H1.
- When the image in the slider doesn’t have the filename, alt-text and title.
- Making use if the H-hierarchy as a design component.
- Thinking that the responsive design will automatically become the ideal mobile UI.
- Make use of the robots.txt for better indexation management.
- Not enabling the editorial or admin of the page control manage things like canons, robots, link no-follow, on-page mark-up, as well as imagine alignment.
You need to invest in an expert team at work
To ensure that a website has the best design, it is necessary to include all those linked with the website. If there’s an argument or conflict in the website development process, it can lead to pointless issues later. Hence, it’s necessary to have a clean foundation right at the start. The other way of addressing this is by starting the work from the basics. It is essential to have seamless communication between both the SEO and web design teams. There might be areas where both the group think and react differently. But the challenge is to arrive at a strategy that works the best for the website and brand as a whole.
Hence, both the web design team and the SEO staff should think of promoting the website and the brand! The objective is to highlight the best qualities and aspects of the brand so that there is more web traffic, website visibility, and online sales. None of the teams should skimp their skills. The methods for SEO are usually measurable and precise. But no one can estimate the way a user will respond to a webpage. Different people respond differently. And each response is a clue. It is necessary for customers and online users to have faith in the website. And the website design and presentation should have an element of simplicity and credibility. Even SEO professionals want the same. It helps them to target a more significant customer base and initiate brand to customer communication. These are some pointers that will help you to shape your website design strategies for the days to come.