seo

Wondering how search engine optimization and web design go hand in hand & why does it matter to your business? If yes, there is so much to tell you about! Come, let’s dive deeper into it.

If you’re managing a business or a website, then good SEO can help you with your digital presence.

How will you determine a good SEO?

Good SEO will scale your business presence online and helps you in branding and lead acquisition, which is still a dream for many people.

Do you know, SEO and web design go hand in hand with one other? It is because a poor web design will definitely make a negative impact on Google and various other search engine’s guidelines. And that is why it really gets important for your business to optimize your website design according to SEO norms.

Come, let’s now have a look at how Calgary SEO Companies believe SEO and web design are related to each other and why you must focus on a search engine optimized website design.

How Does SEO Work?

Before we directly jump into this, let’s have a quick review on how does it (SEO) actually work on Google. Well, the Google search engine makes use of web crawlers to crawl the search engine in pursuit of suitable websites that would likely be able to provide solutions to what users are seeking (search queries).

There are three primary functions served by search engines:

Crawl – Scour the whole Internet for content, examining the content or code for every URL it finds.

Index – Store and manage the content found in the crawling process. And once a webpage is indexed, it is going to be shown to some relevant queries.

Rank – Show up the content that answer’s the searcher’s query best. The results are ordered in most relevant to the least relevant pattern.

What Matters For Search Engines?

Although it’s a technologically advanced and fast-paced world, but web crawlers still rank your website based on its text. Primarily, this is why it’s been suggested by many marketers to get all your internal linking and main pages simple to read and organize well. If not, you risk it being really hard for the web crawler to fulfill its job effectively.

It does not matter if there are sliders, videos, flash images, gifs, and attractive animations; still, there should text-based content present on the website.

PRO TIP – Making use of things such as Google web fonts is going to make it simpler for Goggle to read your website content, whereas sites such as Link Now can help you with the optimization thing.

Remember that – in the end, Google simply wants to read your website thoroughly. It is also going to reward you if it feels so. And this is what you need to hold in now and beyond. Let’s now have a look at some specific areas:

Fundamentals

There are some core elements that set the stage for optimized website design process.

Hosting

Hosting in an important thing! A slow-running site makes users unhappy. Updated rules should be followed while hosting. You need to be situated where your target audience is situated. Try to be more platform-specific and quick, to make out the most.

Domains

Ensuring your domain makes sense and relates to what your business does is super important. No need to be fooled by thinking adding keywords in domain name is going to help. This only seems to be a draft; so be sensible in it. In fact, ensuring that all sub-domains and variations are effectively pointing on the website & re-directing to every canonical version of the website is important too.

CMS (Content Management System)

CMS is going to decide a lot of things. WordPress is one great option preferred by many businesses. It is wired up in a way Google can understand. This is not to mean WordPress is the ideal choice every time, but indeed it is one great starting point for many businesses. You only need to be certain that the CMS you choose is the right one for your business requirements.

Internal Linking

It is important to make crawlers discover your internal links. And for that, you need to ensure all the tools and primary navigation let other webpages to be discovered easily.

PRO TIP – There are many tools that can help you in this, and Screaming Frog is one amongst the list!

XML Sitemap

The XML sitemap makes search engine understand a website structure while crawling. As you pass more data to search engine, you can know webpages that are more valuable and hence give them a priority.

Follow W3 Norms

Google love clear and well-organized code. Well, who doesn’t? Clear code can make the site index easily, and often exhibits how well the site is designed. Following W3C norms further make you write semantic code, which is actually a good thing for SEO.

Optimize Images

Images are an important element of the website. However, many times it gets overlooked when it happens to SEO optimization. Integrate some effective tricks and have superbly optimized images.

Clear Homepage

A clear homepage makes it easy for Google to understand what your business does and how it can help the users seeking for the services you’re already trading in. Therefore, make sure to include important things such as your services, keywords, company name, testimonials, nature of your services because this is what Google is actually looking for.

In fact, make sure to get all these in a text-based format so that it gets easy for the Google crawlers to crawl it. And if a crawler is not able to find it, then my dear friend, it is completely worthless for you, as no one is going to visit your website anyway.

Use Heading & Sub-Heading Tags Carefully

Ensure to make the right use if heading tags in your website content. Heading tags provide Google with data on the structure of the html document. Many times, they also give more value on these tags as compared to other text.

<h1>Heading</h1>

<h2>Heading</h2>

<h3>Heading</h3>

<h4>Heading</h4>

<h5>Heading</h5>

Use JavaScript Cautiously

Many businesses make use of JavaScript overly in their whole site. Google crawl through different site to index them and then decide their rankings. If the site has an over usage of JavaScript, Google will find it hard to understand the site and will cause crawling problems. JavaScript don’t even works well on smartphone devices.

URLs

Web crawlers usually use the structure of the Uniform resource locator to get the context of your site’s internal links. The best thing to be followed over here is by staying consistent with the structure and names of your internal links. It would work great if you keep it as clear as you can.

Let’s suppose if your website is an online business offering online education courses and books, then you should do blog posts on topics such as:

Why should students consider reading our notes?

How can academic revision notes help you score better?

Now, suppose its

.com/reading-our-notes

.com/7-15-2019/

.com/score-better-marks

Have you noticed how does the second link is going so out-of-the-way? In fact, in such a case, Google is going to get in figuring out what this is and hence will not give the credit for posting the blog. Hence, it becomes a must to ensure that website URLs are consistent, aligned, and address the search engine that is a post all about.

SEO and Web design Altogether

This is how SEO and Web Design go hand in hand. It gets essential for you and your business to consider how web crawlers and your users will perceive your website. In addition to this, get a website designed in such a way that it is simple to navigate so that anyone can know your offerings.

Let’s Fix Your Web Design and SEO Today!

Understanding the connection between web design and SEO is the key to strengthening your website. It is also your path to maximizing your website’s potential and finding ways to reach out to the target audiences.

If you are thinking of redoing your site but do not know where to begin, then Calgary web design can help you with the best.

Connect with us and request a design quote. Let us know precisely what you want, and we can start working on your web design and SEO!

Developed in 2008 by Varien, a California-based application software company, Magento is a widely used open-source platform for e-commerce. Varien sold majority of its shares to eBay, which subsequently took over operations and added Magento to their e-commerce initiatives.

However, after the eBay break-up, Magento was spun off into an independent company. An enhanced software was released thereafter, spearheaded by its new owner, Permira.

Magento 2.0 was officially released in the latter part of 2015. The repackaged software is still written PHP but improved for maximum user engagement. This new version of Magento also facilitates smooth navigation. Users can take advantage of tools that allow them to easily manage and monitor their business.

Facts About Magento

Magento is regarded as one of the leading e-commerce platforms. Many popular brands use this platform to power their websites including Pepe Jeans, Burger King, soccer club Liverpool F.C. and Huawei.

More than 600,000 websites have used Magento and it currently powers nearly 200,000 live sites. This software is preferred by websites in the following industries (both B2B and B2C): shopping, business, vehicle manufacturing, health, technology and sports.

According to its website, Magento has “over $100 billion in gross merchandise volume.” Billions of products are showcased on different Magento platforms, but its most redeeming feature is its business-friendly system. This e-commerce software is designed to increase profit for business owners.

Reasons to Use Magento

Business owners have more reasons to use Magento. Though not the ultimate e-commerce platform, Magento presents numerous advantages that drive business growth.

Below is a list of defining traits that make this software worth using:

1. Configured for Smartphones and Tablets

There is no better way to get head of the pack than through a responsive website. As more and more people use mobile phones and tablets to browse websites or shop online, a responsive layout that loads fast on any device and changes its dimensions to fit user screens creates better user experience. That is why if you want to encourage users to browse deeper into your store, make sure it loads fast and accommodates any screen size

Magento pays attention to user experience with layouts specially designed for any type of device. One feature, the Magento Enterprise Edition, is capable of speeding up websites, thereby increasing conversions and attracting more customers.

2. Flexible Content Management System

Magento’s visual page editor lets site owners showcase their products on their own terms. They can customise based on their preferences. The content management interface is also easy to use and adjust. Even users without prior coding experience or knowledge would be able to use this platform thanks to its intuitive, what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface.

3. Spacious with Special Hosting Services

Businesses of any size will enjoy using Magento. Its platform can power up to 500,000 product listing under one website. The built-in shopping cart interface can also hold up 80,000 order every hour. This space is more than enough for small businesses with the potential for further growth.

However, users have to take note that this ability to accommodate a large space and thousands of orders at the same time comes with a price. Extra hosting expenses may be in order. If you are thinking about long-term growth, availing of special hosting services may work to your advantage.

4. SEO-Friendly Coding Structure and CMS

Many e-commerce stores – particularly those dependent on organic traffic and online customers – need search engine optimisation. Magento drives traffic as well as customers to your website with its SEO-friendly structure and CMS.

Users can also download SEO extensions or plugins, through which they can check whether keywords and texts placed on their web pages comply with current SEO standards. They can also add custom meta descriptions, alt tags, browser titles and a lot more to their product pages. Moreover, the platform’s mobile-responsiveness trait falls in line with Google’s new indexing rules, which rank mobile-friendly sites higher than non-optimised ones.

5. Cost-Efficient

35 countries use this e-commerce platform and there are over 800,000 Magento developers across the world. Thanks to their efforts, the platform has a large pool of custom extensions. This means, there is no need for you to build an e-commerce site from scratch. Just work on what they already built and add enhancements or make adjustments as you see fit.

In addition, you can launch Magento in any language using any currency. For business owners, particularly those catering to a global market, this saves time and resources. Furthermore, Magento facilitates conversion rate optimisation – a fine-tuning process that lets users maximise the use of their shopping cart and checkout page.

Ideal E-Commerce Platform

Time and time again, Magento has proven its worth as a leading e-commerce platform. While only five advantages have been listed above, should you choose to use this software for your online business, you will understand that this versatile software can actually benefit your business in more ways than just five.

The key takeaway here is that this platform is not for everyone. For one, it is not for free. So every business that chooses to use this platform must be willing to invest money. The returns are worth it, however, because this software’s creators designed it for business growth. Business owners can also choose packages commensurate to their available budget.

Building a website using this platform may entail costs, but the good news is that you do not have to spend beyond your budget. You only pay for what you can afford.

How SEO and Web Design Go Hand In Hand?