This is the second part in a series of six articles about SEO. Stay tuned to Schoolhouse Marketing for the full series on optimizing your marketing channels for the homeschooling market.
Are you confident that your website is working the way it should to rank high in search engine results pages (SERP)? There is so much more to good SEO than what the eye can see. The last email in our SEO series provided some guidance in the importance of keyword research. Below, you will learn the vital elements in the design of your website and how to improve your website SEO performance.
Web design is much more than just making your online location look appealing to visitors. There are many elements of a web page that can help your site rank high in SERP and should be part of your standard practice for adding pages or improving pages for SEO.
Before we get to the basic list of important (but easy) website elements to optimize for SEO performance, ensure your website is mobile friendly. It almost doesn’t need to be mentioned anymore since it has been about five years when Google made mobile friendliness a ranking factor, but there are a few websites that haven’t made the necessary changes. If you have a WordPress website, making that shift was likely easy as most themes have programmed the necessary CSS to automatically create a mobile site. If you don’t have a mobile site, the cheapest and easiest way to change that is to build on WordPress or another CMS that creates your mobile friendly site automatically. You can do every other SEO task perfectly, but if you don’t have a site that provides a version for mobile users, your site will not be shown anywhere near the top of SERP.
Now, on to the design and structure elements of your website. Review these top five tips to offer search engines and human visitors a favorable experience on your site.
- Visually appealing pages – Not only is this important to make a good first impression for your human visitors, which would encourage them to stay on your site, but search engines also like a site where visitors don’t leave quickly (lower bounce rate) and has a good display of content, not too many hyperlinks, and an appealing use of color.
- Quick loading pages – Website speed is an important part of technical SEO, and it is a problem that plagues many websites. If your site takes too long to load, people will leave quickly (making for a high bounce rate), and your SERP ranking will be lower too. Speed up your site by using web optimized images, deleting unnecessary plugins, allowing browser caching, and minimizing third party applications that load on the page. Check your page speed with GTmetrix.
- Proper URL structure – Poorly structured URLs can cause confusion to your visitors and result in poor rankings in search results. Most CMS create the proper URL structure automatically (if pages are added properly). They should be consistent throughout your website and show the path the user would take to get there. So you should have subpages under your main pages. Also try to have your URLs include keywords and hyphens to break up words.
- Page titles and meta descriptions – Just like the URL, page titles should follow a consistent pattern throughout your site and include keywords that you are including in the content of the page. Avoid unnecessary words in your page title, but make it reflect the content. The page title and meta description are what is shown, along with the URL, to represent your website on SERP, so share what visitors will get from going to your web page and use words to encourage them to click on your search result.
- Structural tags and text for page elements – You may be familiar with heading tags that format titles to different sizes, but these tags aren’t just for looks. Heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4 . . .) provide structure for your page that search engines use to determine the overall theme of your page. You want to use the tags in order (don’t use an H1 tag and then make the next title H3) and use some of those keyword terms that relate to the optimized title and URL of the page. Alt text is another attribute that isn’t noticed as much visually on your site (unless the images don’t load), but it is important for every image to have! Search engines use this text to get to know your site content, and this is a pretty big one for accessibility too.
Investing time and possibly some money into SEO is a marketing necessity to gain exposure from search engines. When SEO practices are regularly implemented, you’ll make those crawlers favor your site, but you will also be creating a site that is appealing to your visitors. Search engines mainly program their algorithms to display the search results that the people who are searching want to see. If you keep to the SEO best practices for site design and content, you’ll be well informed of what your audience wants to see.
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