Gorgeous Web Design Doesn’t Guarantee High SEO Rankings

What’s the point of updating your website with a gorgeous new web design if nobody visits it? While the whole world has gone crazy about eye-catching, dazzling web designs, for some reason people have forgotten about the importance of the basic website search engine optimization.

Website design and development  involves different aspects that deserve special attention. Valid code, readability, a user-friendly layout, and creative content to name a few can turn accidental visitors into loyal customers.

Making your site SEO-friendly is just as important as achieving eye-catching visual appeal.

Why a Gorgeous Web Design is no Longer Enough

Let’s assume that you are a musician. You have put all your time, money and effort to record your new album. You’ve invested most of your budget into an expensive, modern audio recording studio. You’ve hired a team of professionals to make each track sound just the way you want it. Now, as the album is recorded, it’s high time to think about its promotion. The issue, however, it that you have invested the entire budget into the development process, so you cannot afford an agent who will help you get your tracks published!

When it comes to web development, the same thing can happen. You invest the biggest part of your budget into the development of your website, and leave little to no money for search engine optimization.  So, were the time and budget spent on a remarkable web design really worth it if people cannot reach you?

While the visual appeal of your website may seem to be your most important priority when trying to turn your site into a lead-generating monster, that’s really not the case. Proper optimization of your site’s pages – this is what will help you make your brand more noticeable and let you acquire a larger share of the online search traffic.

Save on Pro Web Designs with Web Templates

A gorgeous web design may cost you less that you think. Building a website on the basis of a ready-made website template you can save your time, money and effort. A ready-made, professionally coded and properly designed base theme will cost you less than $100, if you choose carefully.

For that price you can buy a quality theme with great customization options, ready-made page templates, plugins and other extensions, which can make the process of the web development much quicker and easier.  Additionally, you save money on the purchase of premium extensions since all these are often included in the themes’ download packages.

One of the most popular and reliable providers of ready-made themes is TemplateMonster.  Their inventory includes more than 26,000 of ready-made solutions suited for literally any project and business niche that you can think of. Here are a couple of example themes that will help you build a visually stunning website in no time.

Fooder is an advanced pizza restaurant OpenCart template featuring an impressive design and a number of pro customization options, as well as eCommerce features. Developing your site on the framework of this theme, you (or you your clients) can “build” their order on your site while simply picking the right ingredients and managing their quantity. There is also a possibility to count the cost of the delivery and showcase user reviews from social media platforms.

Monstroid2 is an example of a multipurpose WordPress theme featuring a GPL license. Due to this, the theme can be installed on an unlimited number of web resources for free. This is an ever-growing template, featuring a collection of child skins and multiple layout options that can be modified within an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. All skins get installed lightning-fast. You can switch from one design to another in just a matter of clicks.

These are just a couple of ready-made web designs that allow you to enhance your web page with a gorgeous look and pro functionality without investing a fortune into a custom-made page.

SEO Tactics Every Web Designer should Be Aware of in 2017

2017 has brought a number of changes to the way people market their products and promote their businesses on the web. Contemporary users surf the web more often than they did in earlier years. So, online marketers need to put more effort into making their web pages more “findable”.

So, what techniques do we need to take into account to make our web designs rock? Let’s have a look.

• Social Media. Social media posts from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn gain more importance on the SERPs. More social media content is indexed on Google and other popular search engines. This is expected to blur the lines between SEO strategies for the web and social media platforms. So, optimizing your social media pages will also bring your brand the maximum visibility in search results. Thus, if your social profiles are properly optimized, a user will see your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles on the first page of Google.
• Mobile-friendly design. Google has shifted to mobile-first indexing. This means that both mobile and desktop versions of your site are based on the mobile site specifically. So, if the mobile version of your site is significantly different from the desktop, then you may expect to see a drop in your rankings. At this point, you may assume that the mobile version of your site has less content than the desktop. This is when responsive web designs come into play. Building your website on a fully responsive framework guarantees that every piece of data provided on the pages of your site will scale up and down to any screen resolution, without losing any single piece of data.
• Switch from HTTP to HTTPS. Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol:  SSL is a new SEO ranking factor for Google. The search engine now gives a greater prerogative to https pages, displaying those on top of its search results. So, make sure that your site works in conjunction with a SLL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol. The latter will give you a chance to increase your site’s rankings in Google, as well as attain better referral data. In such a way, you will know exactly where your traffic is coming from.
• Post new articles frequently. It’s important to add new quality content to your website on a regular basis. When working on a new publication for your site, make sure that it is relevant to the topic of your website and brings some value to your readers. Also, make sure that your posts isn’t too short. Google seems to reward long posts, containing an average of 2,000 words each. However, 700-1,000 word length is also enough. One more thing that you need to take into account is making your data easy to digest. Readable texts with catching titles and clear sub-headings grow the chances of making a user stay on the page and read your text to the bottom line.
• Update old content. It’s more likely than not that your website includes pages/posts with lots of shares and impressions. Make up a list of such pages and start off by updating the content with relevant data. Those may be links to your newer publications, for example. You can also update your old content by improving title tags and meta descriptions.
• Benefit from the word of mouth. Nothing works better for attracting new clients than user testimonials and reviews – especially getting more Google reviews. In addition to bringing loads of organic traffic to your site, user reviews ensure that your business will look more reliable in the eyes of the web audience. These are especially useful when a new customer comes across your site. A couple of words written by a person who dealt with your organization previously are better than the most cleverly written marketing text. Just make sure that the reviews that people leave on your site are not just copied and pasted from other resources. Such content will not bring you the desired value.
• Link building. Link building is one of the most proven ways to build trust with search engines. What this means is that you find popular websites in your niche and ask them to provide links back to your site. One of the proven ways to get links back to your site is creating an expert roundup and an infographic. To achieve this, make up a series of questions that you can ask experts in your industry. Make sure that answers to these questions will bring certain value to your audience. Next, organize them graphically into an infographics so that other blogs can add it to their own resources and link back to your site.

These are 7 of the most effective SEO tactics that you need to take into account when working on your online marketing strategy in 2017.

Stick to these techniques in order for your visually stunning website to gain more targeted visits from the web