7 Basic SEO Skills that Web Designers Need to Have

Web design isn’t just about having a pretty website. It is important how a site is organized and structured underneath the beautiful images and nifty call to action buttons.

As a professional web designer, it’s also essential to have basic SEO skills so that you can rank high on search engines and increase lead web conversions:

Site Structure

Every website must be created with a clear and logical structure. The homepage must present the brand purpose and the supporting details of this purpose should be outlined in the website’s subpages.

As a rule of thumb, keep your site’s depth to three or four layers. Going beyond that will cause web crawl issues.

URL Structure

URLs impact your website’s SEO, so it’s important to do them right from the very beginning. Below are tips for when you create URLs:

• Opt for a short URL because it is easier to remember.
• Use words that describe the content of your web page. Stick with plain English. Avoid abbreviations or letter-number combinations. Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Use hyphens to categorize words for readability.

Navigation

Don’t make it hard for your customers and visitors to navigate your site. A site menu should be placed at the top of the site or along the sidebar. Every web page should be easily accessible. Refrain from making ‘orphaned pages’ – web pages that are not connected from any other pages on the site.

Responsiveness

Creating a responsive website should be a priority for web designers. The website should be viewable on all devices to provide good user experience and to rank well on search engines. Test your site’s mobile-friendliness by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Site Speed

Site speed is an important SEO factor that also affects user experience. Slow-loading web pages are penalized by Google. Users are also inclined to bounce off when it takes ages to view a single web page. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to test your site’s speed and make necessary adjustments to make your web pages load faster.

The Title, Header, and Meta Description

Crafting effective meta tags that catch people’s attention is also a basic SEO skill that web designers need to learn:

In your page title, use at least one keyword that is relevant to the content of your specific web page. Include keywords in the header tags of each of your pages.

Meta descriptions are the snippets of text that appear under the links in SERPs. They impact how many people click on your site in SERPs. In a way, they serve as organic ‘advertising’, so you need to strategically include main keywords to attract clicks.

Optimized Images

At this point in time, search engines still cannot read images. However, you can still optimize images on your website by following these best practices:

• Use keywords that accurately depict your images.
• Use alt tags with your images.
• Use the right size because images that are too big can slow down the downloading