Search Engine Optimization continues to remain a mythical feature for many online businesses, something that they cannot always relate to for business projection and growth. The fast-evolving algorithms of search engines especially Google has certainly made SEO an unchartered territory for most businesses, who seek to navigate the territory in pursuance of glory and growth.
Well, though Google constantly updates its search engine algorithms (often times for the better), few basics remain constant. As with any other scientific evolution with few basic constant variables; here too there are certain variables that remain constant irrespective of the change or modification in the algorithm.
One constant variable over the years has been the search engine friendly website designs. By friendly, we refer to optimization of website designs so that search engine spider can easily crawl through the entire website. By aligning their website designing to the standards of search engine crawlers, businesses can definitely achieve higher and better rankings in SERPs.
Here are some creative web design practices by Starlinks to integrate into web designs for better search engine rankings.
- Site Structure
Site structure serves as a route map for search engine crawlers to move through pages. Without an adequately designed site structure, search engine crawlers won’t be able to move in between the pages, which might lower your index ranking for some pages or at times for complete website. A search engine friendly website design will include site structure with following components:
– Universal and individual page pathways; leading into and out of all the pages
– A persistent selection of page and section titles; including headings and subheadings
– Hierarchical listing of pages; in accordance with the importance of an individual page, including content or graphical elements.
Now, remember, from users’ perspective navigability (navigation system) is important to help them find information, services or products they are looking for. As a general rule, the harder it is for a human to navigate a website, harder it is for search engine crawlers to access your web pages.
- HTML Headings
Over the years, the importance of HTML headings has increased manifolds. Today, the HTML tags are considered as the primary source of listing on a search engine. They are read by search engine crawlers to relate the content of specific pages. For instance, H1 (Heading 1) is considered as the most important elements of a website page and is often followed by subheadings H2, H3, H4 etc.
Search Engine crawlers read through these headings to anticipate meaning of a page. Without properly defined, search engine friendly and relevant HTML headings, crawlers won’t be able to fully comprehend the meaning of a specific page, thus lower ratings over SERPs.
- Page Load Time
It isn’t just the humans who hate slow loading pages, search engines also find them problematic. As a matter of fact, search engines find it hard to scan and index slow loading pages and thus lower rankings. Various factors can add to the load time of web pages, including the amount of content, images, graphical elements, etc. Some other factors that determine the load time include whether the web pages are optimized through compression or caching or not.
Google has officially indicated that page load time is taken into account for web page rankings on its search engines. This means fast loading pages that are optimized in accordance with SEO guidelines from Google have a better chance to rank higher than web pages with high load time.
Wrapping Up:
Although SEO practices have been evolving fast, still you can achieve better rankings and higher ratings simply by adhering to few basic variables that have remained constant over the years. Keeping the website design within the given standards of the search engine can significantly boost your business rankings not just over Google by other major search engine ratings as well.
