There are more than one billion live websites on the internet. As the digital sphere continues to grow, it becomes more important than ever for our websites to be fully optimized. There is a ton of competition online, so websites need to stand out and stand up against the competition. Websites also need to be optimized to be user-friendly, efficient, fast, and in line with search algorithms.
So, with search engines and online user habits constantly changing, how do you know that your site is fully optimized for the coming weeks, months, or year? The best way is to understand the features that make a website well-optimized and create a strategy to implement these features in your website design process.
Tips for a Fully Optimized Website Design
Part of a great website design is ensuring that your site is optimized for user-friendliness, mobile devices, and search engine optimization (SEO). Put together by web designers in Charlotte, NC, here are some tips for making sure you are getting the most out of your website design.
Master Your On-Page and Off-Page Optimization
On-page and off-page optimization is important to fully optimizing your website. On-page optimization refers to the items on your web pages, such as keywords, titles, internal links, and content. Off-page optimization refers to promotion of your site, such as through social media or link building.
Both are important to help your site rank well and meet SEO guidelines that search engines like Google look for. When on-page and off-page optimization is mastered, your site will rank better, you will have more traffic, and hopefully you will gain more customers.
Optimize Your Site for Voice Search
In order to fully optimize your site, you need to be aware of current trends. Right now, an estimated 50% of searches are voice searches. How many times have you heard “Hey Google”, “Hey Alexa”, or “Siri”? When these digital assistants are summoned, the user is likely going to ask a question and will be provided with search results. The key is making sure that your website and content is geared toward voice searches, which tend to be phrased differently than a text search.
Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Around 60% of internet usage in 2018 was done on mobile devices. That number has most likely only increased since then, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With that in mind, it is more important than ever to make sure your website is mobile friendly. That means making sure that your web design program or platform is set up to display your pages correctly on different size devices. Online users are five times more likely to leave a mobile site that does not fit their screen than they are one that is properly optimized for mobile.
Land in the Snippets
In one of their more recent updates, Google added a new “snippet” feature to the search engine results page (SERP). The snippet is a featured paragraph or excerpt from a website that is displayed at the top of the SERP above the search results. Snippet results are pulled based on what the user has searched – most often a question. The snippet effectively answers the question with fewer clicks required by the user.
Website designers and SEO specialists have an opportunity here to optimize the site and content to be more snippet-friendly. To do so, think about the questions that a user may ask related to your sites topic, product, or service. Create content that directly answers those questions. Also, prioritize your keywords to meet those questions.
Add Video SEO
Now more than ever, video is an important part of any website or SEO strategy. Google is even using videos to answer search queries. If you do a search for “how to bathe a dog”, you will get normal search results, a snippet answer, and now, possibly video search results at the top of the SERP. Creating videos to add to your website and content is a great way to reach a new audience and increase traffic to your site.
