Designing For Engagement - SEO Tactics To Amplify Web Design Impact

Every website has a unique design that defines its usability or the way it is employed by the visitors. Still, even the most beautiful website can hardly attract users’ attention and invite them to engage if the search engines fail to comprehend and rank the pages. 

Thereby, engaging with your audience is enhanced by proper optimization of your website for search engine results pages, thereby increasing the flow of traffic to your site. 

This article discusses five strategies web designers use to make aesthetics meet SEO strategies of web design and marketing company in a way that will make the most sense.

Optimize Page Speed 

Speed is an important element of the website and slow page speed ultimately leads to poor visitor engagement levels. It is often a very critical issue to ensure that a site loads as fast as possible and hence it is crucial to optimize for site speed. 

There are various ways that website designers can apply to help in getting better load times including the following; optimizing images, reducing the number of HTTP requests, checking for broken links, enabling browser caching, and hosting from a good server. 

While the attractive looks bring users to the site of Web-pages, fast loading times keep them there. Therefore, the main challenge for designers is to achieve the right balance – having rich and expressive graphics while maintaining fast rendering. 

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the part of the hyperlink that can be clicked on and is normally the visible text. Descriptive anchor texts are the texts that inform the user about the page that the link is connected to without the click of the link. 

For instance, the anchor text like “types of pet food” is much more informative than any generic “click here”. The good writing of the anchor text is to provide the users with the necessary amount of information about the linked content without interfering with the navigation process. 

It is also used by search engines to define what parts of the website describe, to help in their crawling and indexing. Any optimization of this aspect has to be welcomed. 

Captioning Images 

On the one hand, images make the sites look more attractive; on the other hand, if the visitors cannot understand the images due to their disability, the loss of opportunities to reach out to them is a significant drawback. 

Secondly, they are unable to identify context from images alone since they are incapable of understanding the surrounding circumstances. Including alt text deals with both issues because it provides textual tags to items that are not textual. 

For instance, the alt text for the image may read “white dog with black spots chasing a red frisbee across green grass” which relays information about the image to users who use screen readers. 

Structure URLs Semantically

Links are bookmarks that help users navigate from one Web site to another or from one page to another within the same Web site. Good URL structure by website design company London also helps the bots of the search engine in the proper classification of the content of the web page. 

The overall idea is to keep page URLs as close as possible to the content of the page in order to maintain a logical structure of the website with regards to the navigation. 

The readability of URLs allows visitors to know what pages are included in a site just by reading the address. Thus, while bots can provide very accurate results when indexing pages for specific searches, the same may not be said for their human counterparts. 

Conclusion

As people like beautiful and functional design, it brings in the visitors, but SEO and modern UX keeps the visitors in. Such strategies as enhancing page loading time, using anchor texts, images, URLs, and link descriptions, as well as enhancing site’s mobile friendliness appear petty at initial instance. 

But taken as a whole, it is the grand sum of great engagement totals – more visibility with the desired audience, less bounce rate, and more time spent on the page. 

In view of this, there is a need for web design to balance between aesthetics and other means of getting the attention of the targeted audience as well as the search engines.