Finding the Balance: Website Design and SEO

by ​Sujain Thomas, Guest Contributor

What is a good website? Great websites are the fine blend of high-quality content, latest web design, commendable SEO efforts, and smart marketing strategies. While design and SEO make the best couple, the web has ever seen, most designers and web developers are yet to picture them together. That is the reason most websites with great content lack enough SEO efforts, and most sites with robust SEO strategies don't have appealing content.
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Sadly, for most Brooklyn business websites, two separate teams deal with SEO and design individually. That has been the norm since the genesis of websites and modern site design. There are little communication and coordination between them, and that results in a disparity between a site's navigation, content and search engine friendliness. Expecting the two teams to work together is like expecting a frog to turn into a prince. It simply does not happen!

Every company needs to find a delicate balance between the teams. You need to create a platform where SEO ideas and design concepts meet.

Let’s begin with navigation
When you are finalizing the navigation, make sure that the elements are simple. The categories and sub-categories, filtering options, and product lists should not confuse your visitors. It is up to the designers to keep the design appealing, and it is the responsibility of the marketing team to make the navigation efforts search engine friendly.

The aim of balancing the navigation with the design is to award the site with organic visibility. It should make locating a particular item easily through the navigation of categories, subcategories, and related articles. It becomes easy when you include a targeted keyword on the product in your category or subcategory pages. Visit https://brooklynseo.net/web-design/ to learn more about the hierarchy of content on webpages.  

Optimizing for search engines is synonymous to optimizing for human users right now. Here are a few additional things you need to remember...

• Cross-Linking pages – the content and SEO teams should be able to establish multiple cross-links between blogs, FAQ, product description and landing pages. Crosslinking can drive organic traffic to the product pages and drive conversion. It not only bypasses several additional navigation steps, but it also enables people to find precisely what they are looking for in record time. It is a brilliant way to improve the user experience.  
• Easy choices and navigation options – when a person is there to shop, he or she does not want to solve a riddle. You should lay out the navigation options clearly in front of them. Always remember that your consumer is smart, but at the same time, they don't want to use much brain-power while shopping for stationary or a pair of pants! Your site should be able to guide their shopping experience.  
• Establishing content hierarchy – content hierarchy is essential. It organizes your pages in the form of categories and subcategories. Research shows that websites with extensive subcategories of products or services typically perform well when these pages belong to particular navigation-friendly categories.

How much content is necessary?
Is more content more? Or, do we need less? These questions plague the developers and SEO teams of Brooklyn-based companies endlessly. There never seems to be one right answer! That is because success does not lie in quantity, but the quality of the content. Did you know? When you overlay text on a JPG image, Google cannot crawl it like regular text. You need to couple images with HTML code for the crawlers to read it.

That is one of the most important reasons the Brooklyn SEO teams should work with developers during the content development phase. Together they should create SEO-optimized content that does not usurp the website design.

What are the different content types?
While we are debating about the length, there are people, who are utterly confused about the type of content that should go on their site pages. Since Google does not consider every content type equal, we have decided to list the different pages that should have various content types...

1. Homepage
2. Category page
3. Subcategory pages
4. Product pages

These content types can be images, videos, and product descriptions in regular HTML text with keywords. You can crosslink the product descriptions with blog posts to create a satisfactory UX with little effort. Since search engine crawlers are unable to read non-text files like images and videos, including Alt texts and descriptions beside each image is a must for making SEO-friendly sites.

Content for indexing
Every SEO-friendly site belonging to businesses in Brooklyn has one true quality – all of the content on its pages are easily readable by search engine crawlers. Almost all SEO teams swear by HTML for creating crawlable content since JavaScript has its bunch of challenges for all users.

Finding the delicate balance between SEO and design is no longer challenging. One way to facilitate the development of an optimized and user-friendly site is to encourage the coordination between your design and SEO teams from the very beginning of the project.

Author Bio: 

​Sujain Thomas is a data expert. She has been working with complex database architecture and big data analytics for almost eight years now. She has been helping many leading corporations optimize their customer service and product introductions as per big data analysis and predictive analysis.