Statistics show that website design is what 75% of a company's credibility is based on. It is where the first impression of your business is made. An important tactic of search engine optimization (SEO) is perfecting your website design. In the end, the website design is what makes or breaks the efforts of digital marketing. There are a number of aspects of a website that you must be sure to have in order to successfully utilize SEO to reach results.

1. The Ideal URL

When creating or refining your website, URLs should be taken into account for SEO purposes. When a site does not have a proper link structure, search engines may not be capable of crawling and indexing the site, causing your site rankings to lower. Crawling and indexing are actions that search engines, like Google, take to analyze whether or not a website meets the standards to show in organic search results. Crawling is when the search engines analyze website content and code for keywords and signals that tell where to rank content on search results. Indexing is making it possible to show up on the search results page. An indexed website is determined as having a navigatable, perceptible, and easily understood content strategy of the website design.

2. Keep Your Website Up To Date

Your website should be updated consistently. After working to rise in the rankings through SEO, you do not want to lose all of your hard work by having a website that people click off immediately. It should be constantly updated to reflect accurate, real-time information on your company. Keeping an updated site also means making it visually appealing. A website should accurately represent your business and also be visually appealing to visitors.

3. Be Mobile Device Friendly

Mobile devices have become increasingly popular for viewing websites, with 87% of web visitors going through their smartphones instead of a desktop. Because of this, it is imperative that your website is mobile-device friendly. No matter if your website is on the first page of search results, if the website that is tapped on a phone is not optimized for a mobile device, the business opportunity is lost. A website can still be indexed by Google when it is not mobile-friendly, however, the ranking for SEO purposes will be significantly lowered without a mobile-friendly website design.

4. Be ADA Compliant

Website designs should always be ADA-compliant. Designing a compliant website can be done with a few tweaks to the website to make it better accessible and accommodative to all people. You can add additions to your website that are compliant with the ADA by creating alt tags for images, videos, and audio files, and writing text transcripts for video and audio content. You can also identify the site’s language in the header code, and create a consistent, organized layout.

5. Keep It Secure From Hackers

With the growing popularity of SEO for businesses, SEO is also gaining popularity amongst cybercriminals. It is vital to your website design that it is secure from hackers. To protect your site from hackers, you should filter and monitor traffic to and from your website to secure the site against malware. It is essential to be using a reputable web-hosting platform for your websites. Many platforms are often targeted by hackers, so be sure to look into how safe your web-hosting platform is. Another tip is to utilize an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) protocol that provides server authentication and client authentication that is performed when clients connect to the server.

We Are Here To Help!

At Auburn Advertising, we strive to give you tips and tricks for the digital marketing of your business. We are a public service offered by Inner Spark Creative, a full-service advertising agency that informs you of all things marketing and advertising. At Inner Spark Creative, our experts are up to date on all the trends and digital technologies to advertise your business successfully. We have a team of individuals who share vast knowledge in SEO and web design, and we want to share our knowledge with our community. If you are interested in any of our offered services, contact us today!