Not just anyone can build a successful website. While there are hundreds of freelancers, graphic designers, or perhaps even free work to be gotten from your college-aged niece, it takes more than just appealing design to successfully market your website and gain conversions. Your website may be pretty, but is it also helpful?
The work of a great web designer or developer is to make sure that the website they create works well for you.
While designing for any medium involves a look that should be balanced and professional, web designers also need to serve as a functional guide to facilitate a user’s journey through a website.The cost of being lackadaisical when it comes to your website setup and build is too great a risk to take for your business in the long run. Here are a few reasons why it is essential to ensure that whoever builds your website is also an expert on digital marketing and SEO.
Your Website is too Important to Take Lightly
Especially after a global pandemic, your website is even more so a key aspect of your image and public reputation, and your most important marketing tool. To brush it aside and move forward is to plan to climb a mountain without being intentional about what you pack. The truth is that your website, what it contains, and how it functions is a cornerstone of a holistic marketing strategy. While many start-ups may just need to rush and get something up on the web, it would benefit all business owners greatly to take time and critically look at your site.
Setting up Initial Website SEO for Success
An aspect of having a digital marketing-minded website that is making sure the website is built and written in a way that is SEO-friendly. This means that the content on your website is of utmost importance. The way your website is ranked is based on search engines crawling the content of your site, interpreting it, and then serving it to users that the content pertains to. If your website is full of non-specific terminology, minimal text and/or unorganized content, you may be setting yourself up for a big challenge when it comes to competing for organic search rankings.
It is worth noting here that the words and content on your pages described above is just the tip of the iceberg when thinking about best practices to set your website up for search ranking success. Every website at the very minimum needs metadata like page titles and descriptions to be filled out, a properly tagged heading structure, and an internal linking strategy (among other things). Ensuring you get all of these things done right necessitates someone who is not only aware of these SEO elements, but who is knowledgeable enough about them to do them well.
SEO-Friendly Development Practices
Developing a website in a way that is SEO-friendly goes hand-in-hand with SEO-friendly content writing and initial SEO practices. Here are a few practices important to setting up a website for SEO success:
1) Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices
Especially since of your website to determine your ranking (and other search engines are following suit), it is now more important than ever to ensure your mobile experience is at its best.
2) Utilize Schema Markup
Schema markup, or structured data, involves building out and tagging specific content or site elements in a way that tells search engines particular things about the content’s characteristics. For example, by marking up your blog posts with you help search engines understand what type of content you are publishing and what it is about in simple terms; this positively impacts your website SEO.
3) Develop Crawlable Site & URL Structures
The way in which your pages and URLs are nested and organized communicates a lot about the meaning of your site content. By organizing your pages and URLs with subfolders that are properly nested, it gives search engines a clearer picture of how your content relates to one another and results in a more comprehensive understanding of your website.
The Complexity & Nuance of SEO
If the above advice and best practices are starting to feel overwhelming, that is okay. If one thing is for certain, it is that a high-performing website with great SEO is complex. And there’s not a turnkey solution to building and maintaining a website with the best SEO that will bring you the leads you are looking for.
Google and other search engines change their search ranking algorithms multiple times per day, so it truly is a full-time job to stay on top of what those changes are, what they mean, and how to change your website to cater to search results.
Build a Website that Looks Great & Performs Better
The benefit of using a web design company that also employs experts in search engine optimization is that you can rest assured that your website development team is aware and working towards making your website better-suited for good search performance. Not only that, but it goes without saying that the people who build your website are the people that know it best. to inquire about a website project focusing on setting you up with a competitive edge in the digital marketing realm.
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