5 Web Design Tricks That Will Boost Your Site’s SEO

Digital marketers pay undeviating attention on content marketing, email marketing, on-page/off-page SEO, social media optimization, and other strategies to boost their site’s SEO; concurrently, also keep a constant tab on the latest SEO trends.

The past few years saw the marketers collaborating with web designers for an entire web design revamping to make their site SEO-friendly and increase its visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo etc. However, a fully functional and responsive website does not require redesigning; just a few web design tricks and the website can nab higher SERP ranking and improved search engine visibility.

Yes, in addition to the general SEO strategies like keyword research, content creation, and backlink addition, certain tweaks and additions to the web design can be instrumental in getting your website a higher ranking. That said; here are the 5 web design tricks that will boost your site’s SEO and help you fetch higher traffic to your website.

Add Voice User Interface

Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana are becoming more efficient than ever in answering each and every voice query. Today, 55% of teenagers and 41% of adults are using voice search to solve most of their queries online. This makes it imperative for users to incorporate a voice user-interface in their web design.

Voice search is assisting businesses in boosting their local SEO efforts. People are more inclined towards making local searches using voice UI. Therefore, targeting the local long-tail keywords for the VUI in the web design will lead to increased ranking. Voice search will continue to grow, and having a voice user interface in web page design will soon become a top ranking factor by most search engines.

Avoid Using Flash Images

If you are still using flash images or flash elements on your website, ditch them right away! A number of operating systems and almost all the iOS device are not compatible with flash elements. The web crawlers cannot identify and index the flash images or any other flash elements used on the website. If the search engine crawlers or spiders cannot index the important elements on your website, it will automatically receive low ranking.

In order to boost the site’s SEO, it is imperative that you avoid using flash elements in your web design. In fact, flash elements on the website also make the site load slow and increase the security risks. Alternatives to flash elements are provided by various web designing companies in the form of elements created using HTML5, JQuery, and JavaScript etc.

Integrate Social Media

Social media integration can be the magic trick that will not only improve the search engine optimization of the page but also skyrocket the traffic arriving on the website. Not only the potential customers, but the search engines also value a site which has social media integrated within it. The icons for social media sharing, likes, retweets etc., have become a must-have in the website design.

Moreover, social media icons for instant sharing of the information on the respective social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google + etc., should also be there. This not only boosts your site’s SEO but also improves the legibility of your site.

Optimize The Images

Images and infographics have become a great tool for adding visual appeal to the website. But, did you know that non-optimized images can do more harm than good to your site? All the images added to the website should be optimized by adding Alt texts to them. In the Alt text, you can describe the image, add the targeted keywords related to image and also add the name of your business.

This trick will boost not only the site’s ranking but also increase the visibility of the image in Google search. So if a user performs an image search for the targeted keyword, the optimized image can direct him/her to your site. Image description and Alt tags are already being taken into consideration for improving site’s ranking and it won’t be long before Google rules out an algorithm for image-related SEO as well.

Redirect From 404 Pages

Change in the permalink, removal of content, broken links or misspelled links can lead the visitors directly to the 404 error pages. Now, instead of leaving the user with no choice than to abandon the site forever, let the juices of the linked 404 error page come into action. You can now use 301 redirects to take the user to the linked page. All you need is to offer a good user experience and also rank high on Google.

Tools like Screaming Frog and 404 Checker can help find and fix the broken links on your site. Design the 404 page in a way that the user, as well as Google, gets enough information in form of related links, homepage link, footer links and suggested pages so that the web crawlers do not get stuck on the broken links.

Search Engine Optimization is a very dynamic process and it is beyond the bounds of possibility to get higher ranking on search engines with a single wave of the wand. However, there are various steps one can take to improve the site’s visibility on search engines; one of them is amending the web design. By making the web design more SEO-friendly, you can easily get higher ranking on various search engines and even have an increased flow of potential customers directed to your site.