Top Three Web Design Essentials
There are three vital elements that your website needs if you are going to get the maximum benefit from it online.
If any one of these attributes is weak or poor you will forever struggle to attract the volumes of traffic that you need to be successful.
The Three Essentials:
- Fast, Reliable Hosting
- Mobile Compatibility
- Search Engine Friendly
Hosting
Your Hosting Server is the engine that powers your website. It is not the area to try to save money because you get what you pay for and cheaper hosting is usually cheap for a reason.
Slow servers are often older, have lower grade connectivity and come with additional issues that in the longer term will do your website no favours at all.
Mobile Friendly Design
More that half of all Google searches are conducted on either mobile phones (smart phones) or tablets. These devices need a different version of your website to work properly.
Google especially penalises websites that don’t offer a mobile friendly version of their site so you will rank lower (if at all) on these devices.
Mobile devices aren’t going to go away any time soon so optimize your site and make sure that you don’t miss out of over 50% of your potential customers.
Search Engine Friendly
Being found for what you do, the service you offer or the products you sell is the biggest benefit that search engines offer. You have the potential to appear in front of thousands of prospects that are actively searching online every day for what you offer.
Being search engine friendly involves a two step process;
- Optimize your on-page content
- Increase your popularity, trust and authority
On-page content is straightforward to optimize. There are four important elements that should contain variations of your main keywords that you want to rank for. These are;
- Page Title
- H1 heading tag
- Page content
- Image Alt Text
It is important to be subtle when including keywords and to use LSI variations of your terms rather than just repeating a phrase over and over again.
Once each of your pages has been optimized for a different term of phrase, you need to turn your attention to off-page optimization (backlink creation).
Backlinks are the power that drives your rankings and are given a value depending on the trust, authority and relevance on the page/site that the link comes from.
It’s important to create a balanced link profile that looks natural, so vary the link text that is used because identical link text looks artificial and Google’s spam detection algorithms will soon label your site as low quality and penalise you.