With over 1.5 billion websites in the world, it is crucial that your website has excellent SEO if it wants to lure in an audience. To keep up with such immense competition online, you need to ensure that people can find your website quickly enough. For this, your website should rank well on Google searches.
As the search engines are constantly developing and adapting, and so are people’s online habits, keeping up with SEO trends isn’t so easy. So what SEO trends to follow when making a personal website?
Creating a consistent SEO website design plan will help your site improve with time. Sure, implementing SEO into all elements of your web design may seem like a daunting task. Nonetheless, if you follow these five web design tips for SEO, you are sure to stay ahead in the competition.
1. Link JS script Tags Externally to HTML Document
When you are coding your website, always externalize it with JavaScript and CSS. There are several things search engines take into account when viewing different websites. One very important thing lies in the HTML document.
If you don’t externalize, JavaScript and CSS can add additional lines of code in your HTML document. When this happens, the HTML document is likely to go ahead of the actual content and make crawling of your site slower. Your job is to help the search engine get to the content of your website as quickly as possible.
2. Block Necessary Pages to Avoid Search Engine Index
There could be pages on your website that you don’t want the search engine to follow. These pages could be ones that add no value to your SEO content. You don’t want your audience to click on the page for server-side scripts instead of actual content.
When making your own website, you must test new layouts. You may not realize, but these pages can show up on search engines. They can interfere in leading to your website’s actual page.
Make sure such pages aren’t exposed to web robots. The best way to block these pages from showing up on the search engine is to use a robots.txt file.
If you have a section of the website under testing or development, encrypt it with a password. Or use a local web development environment like WampServer or XAMPP.
3. Keep Your Website Updated with Fresh Content
If you haven’t updated your website for a while, you won’t have good enough SEO rankings. Users are also dissuaded by websites that don’t look fresh and new, and so you will have high bounce rates.
Search engines love to view web pages that frequently update their content. This indicates that the site is alive and working well. With changing content, comes great crawling frequency by search engines.
If your website has a blog, you want to upload it every week. Make room for some excerpts of the latest blog post to put on all of your web pages. You can do the same thing with short videos.
4. Use Unique Meta Descriptions
You must know how important Meta descriptions are for your content. Many web designers make the common mistake of not adding a unique Meta description for each page. What happens then is that several pages of your website will use the same placeholder information.
Remember that every page should have its own metadata. Meta description of each of your website’s page shows on the SERP before someone clicks your webpage. It gives the search engine a better grasp of how your website is structured.
5. On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization makes your content worthy of search engine ranking. The strategies of on-page optimization help search engines to pick your content. You must incorporate relevant SEO keywords in your content.
Remember to properly use primary and secondary keywords for maximum optimization. For pictures and media, use specific title tags and meta tags. You must also include internal links to other pages on your website.
When developing your website, think about the user experience. Think of how a user would navigate your website. User navigation greatly determines the way search engines crawl over your website. If it is hard to navigate for a user, it won’t be any good for the search engine.
Wrapping Up
These SEO tips always remain crucial for your web design, regardless of what the SEO trends are. These tips will allow you to easily level up your SEO game without sacrificing your creativity and style. Make sure to always consider the user’s navigation experience when designing each component of your website.
