When designing a website it is easy to focus on the search engine and forget that once your website is found, that you want the visitors to stay, click, and buy. Of course, you need to include search engine optimizing (SEO), because this is how your website will be found, but it shouldn’t be your main focus. Website users should be number one to focus on and search engines should be number two to focus on when it comes to designing a website.
Some of the things that need to be done to make a website user friendly will include the following:
- Quality Content – when a visitor comes to your website, it won’t matter how user-friendly the website is if there is nothing of interest to the visitor. Be sure the content on the site has value to the visitor.
- Include a Site Map – people have some common ways in which they navigate a website and the basic design of the website will make that possible. For those who can’t find what they are looking for or have trouble navigating your website, they will be able to find what they want quickly by going to your site map.
- Keep Website Design Consistent on Each Page – the color scheme, the heading with logo, navigation menu, footer, and links attributes are the same (for example if links are underlined on one page, they should be underlined on all the pages).
- Be sure site is Functioning Properly – doing the following will assure your website functions properly: test all links, be sure all forms work and will accommodate unusually long words, be sure that the shopping carts are functional, on pages that personal information is required be sure it is a secure connection, and navigation takes you to the page desired.
- Contact Details – include current contact information and all ways (email, phone, etc) that contact can be made. When a visitor has problems with the site, there should be a Webmaster to contact and that will address the issue immediately.
For professional, effective, and easy to navigate website design you may consider a professional website designer that has experience designing user-friendly websites.
In addition to being user-friendly, your website will need to be search engine friendly if you don’t want to be lost among the millions of other websites on your topic. Some business owners can do this themselves, but usually, to get your website ranked fast, you will need someone who has experience. Search engine optimizing of your website can be done in the following ways:
- Include text on images, photos, and graphics – the reason for this is that the search engine crawlers only read the text. Use keywords when adding text to images, photos, and graphics.
- Make the first 100 words count – the first hundred words on your website should be rich in keywords. It is the first 100 words that the search engines will focus on.
- Focus content on each page – focus on the main keyword on each page instead of several keywords because it will be difficult for the search engine to choose one keyword for ranking.
- Keywords in the domain name – this will help the search engines determine the topic of your site and your main keywords. This is useful for information websites and affiliate websites.
- Post titles with keywords in them – a descriptive article title should include the topic of the article, which should be focused on a specific keyword.
- Generate Inbound Links – this This can be done by posting and commenting on blogs that are related to the topics and keywords your website is focusing on, with a link back to your website.
- Monitor the website – to stay on top of how your website is doing. If it starts dropping in position, do what you can to find out why and correct it as soon as possible
These are just general suggestions, there are many more ways to optimize a website for search engines. You can contact an Internet marketing company, like Karma Snack to learn more about the most effective ways to optimize your website for search engines. Karma Snack also has a professional team of experienced website designers that can design user-friendly websites for you.
