When designing a website for your business, do you focus on the user experience or designing your site purely for aesthetics? Although creating an eye-catching and attractive website is important, the way your website shows on search engines and in front of users is just as crucial. In addition to these elements, you need to think about search engine optimization. However, should you consider optimizing your website during your design stages or after your website launch?
Before or After?
A well-structured website can rank higher on search engines. Therefore, considering SEO elements during your design stages can help make the process easier. A well-structured website, it's load speed, navigation, and the number of webpages is all important aspects to consider for your website.
Think of it this way, if you had already spent a large sum of money creating a beautiful website, would you want to spend an additional amount of money altering the design to suit SEO needs?Probably not! So, why would you want to design your website twice, rather than just once?
Also on TechWyse
Ultimate Website Launch Checklist
How long does it take a website to rank on Google?
Things to Optimize Before Your Site Launch
There are several elements that you need to be aware of when optimizing your website for search engines. Even though, much of the SEO takes place after a website has been launched, you want to have your website ready for search engines to crawl. Here are some key factors to consider for your website:
Using Keywords in URLs
Search engines place great emphasis on web pages URL as an indicator of what the page is. Therefore, it is best to implement keywords in URLs before the launch of the concerned website. You want to ensure that search engines are able to identify what your webpages are offering to deliver them to the correct people. In fact, it will also help you rank on search engines with appropriately optimized keywords as well.
Title and Meta Data
The page title of the pages on your website are also important elements for SEO. Different from URLs, titles and meta descriptions are much easier to change, without affecting the SEO efforts and your "link juice."
It's important to ensure that the title on every page is related to the content. You want to have titles that are straightforward and easily understood by both search engines and people. Change the description on each page to make it relate that page’s content that helps the search engines display in its search result description. This factor should be considered before the launch of a website.
Responsive Web Design
A responsive website is crucial nowadays, especially when the number of mobile users is increasing exponentially. Today, people are browsing the web through their mobile phones, smart phones, and tablets.
By designing websites through responsive techniques, it can ensure that users viewing your website on different platforms are able to see the website the way you want it to. Whether it's researching on their phone and completing the sale on their desktop, the website will remain the same. In fact, Google recommends the use of responsive web design and mobile-friendly websites. In addition, Google has included mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor in their algorithms.
Optimize your Visuals
It is a fact that visuals convey a more meaningful message than the text on a website. Therefore, optimizing these images is part of an SEO strategy. When uploading visuals onto your website, ensure that their titling them correctly and using the appropriate sizes or dimensions. The size of your image files can affect the loading speed of your pages.
In addition, if your website is related to videography and you've uploaded a photo of a photographer, you can optimize that image for search engines. You can do so by labeling the image with the correct keywords. Also, ensure that you have the correct description and alt text. If you include keywords like photography taking a picture, it can appear in image results when people are searching for related keywords.
Link Structures that Crawl
Another important factor that needs to be considered while designing a website, according to the SEO perspective, is to create link structures that crawl or crawlable link structures. Search engines require seeing links in order to find the content of the site. A crawlable link structure is a format that lets the crawlers browse the pathways of a website. If there isn't a proper link structure for your website, your SEO will not yield appropriate results.
SEO as an Afterthought? It Can Be Troublesome
Of course, you can always choose to do SEO after you've implemented your website. However, you might be missing out on a lot of great ranking opportunities during this time. You may require a website change, content revamp, and other necessary remodifications in order to properly rank for search engines. Therefore, the process could get troublesome and costly for your business.
SEO takes time. It's a process that requires time and effort in order to see results. However, these results are long-term and extremely important in developing your brand and authority online. Therefore, starting early is better than starting later.
SEO is often considered after a website is complete, so why not think about it before?
on
SEO is hard work no denying that and while the basics would serve you well before you set up your site i strongly feel due to the competitive nature of SEO. It’s better to have some experience in terms of both On Page and Off page SEO so you can optimize your website accordingly.
on
The necessity for technical SEO tactics notwithstanding, I would like to add that consistent, quality content is also another method of further optimization although the continued creation of content takes place after site launch. Planning for such content helps in user experience and in proving relevance to the search engines and, in turn, improves SERP results.