Web design and SEO services are two essential elements for building a website first of all and for creating a visible and discoverable online presence after that. Those two components must exist for you to call it a complete Web Solution and for it to bring any benefits or do you any good at all. Having an Absolutely Stunning Website built and not investing any effort in SEO is simply like writing a Book and keeping it in your closet–no one will see it or find it to be able to read it.
In other words, building a website and publishing it and calling it a day is like writing notes to others in the dark. It’s useless and a waste of time.
The Two Essential Components
1st Half — Web Design
Web Design can be divided into two sub components:
Front-End – Which focuses on building the visual and interactive aspect of a website displayed on the screen.
Back-End – Which focuses on the functional and logical components that operate and run your website in the hidden back stage.
2nd Half — SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
While the 1st half focuses on the visual and functional aspects of a website, the SEO or Search Engine Optimization simply ensures that the website is actually discoverable and can be found by search engines like Google and Indexed properly.
Integrating both Halves together simply ensures a user-friendly experience and a beautiful user interface as well as ensures that the Website is ranked higher in Search Engines and is Discoverable by customers searching for similar products and services online on the web.
Putting it all Together
Web Design
User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI):
A Solid Web Design prioritizes usability and enhances a positive user experience, making it easy for customers and website visitors to find their way around the website and find what they are looking for.
Visual Appearance:
A well-designed Website is visually appealing to the eye and incorporates appropriate complementing vibrant colors that have a good contrast, as well as a readable font family and size. Furthermore, it utilizes images and artwork to create a visual representation and display of topics for a great first impression.
Functionality:
Web design and more specifically the back-end component of the Web Design combines all the logic and functionality required for the website to run efficiently and securely, ensuring that all elements on a page such as buttons, form fields, data retrieval and other tasks all work together seamlessly and properly.
Mobile-Friendliness:
With the spike in mobile device usage over the last decade, a new essential component of web design arise, which is responsive website design, which basically creates the logic and rules required to be able to dynamically adapts the display of the content on pages to fit to different screen widths without the need for any horizontal scrolling.
Website Architecture:
A Properly-Structured website includes a clear navigation structure, a good categorization and placement of related pages in containers or folders basically to help users and search engines easily understand and comprehend the site's organizational hierarchy and how certain pages are associated with one another.
Content Management:
Choosing an efficient and robust Content Management System or platform (CMS) and ensuring an easy-to-use administration module that gives the website owners the ability to easily update page content and product details are also an important part of the web design process.
SEO
On-Page Optimization:
This includes optimizing individual pages with relevant keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, and keyword-rich page content. This is essential to optimize the Website’s SEO for specific topics or products or services.
Technical SEO:
This focuses on the technical aspects of a website that affect search engine crawling and indexing, such as the website loading speed, mobile-friendliness, accessibility and overall organizational structure.
Off-Page SEO:
This involves building or acquiring backlinks from reputable websites to improve a site's authority and trustworthiness.
Content Optimization:
High-quality content is KING. Period! An informative, and engaging content is very important for attracting the right audience and improving search engine rankings.
Keyword Research:
Identifying relevant keywords that users are searching for is the most challenging yet rewarding aspect of SEO for targeting the right audience.
Local SEO:
If a business has a physical location such as an office or warehouse or branch, then local SEO is critical to ensuring that you dominate local search results when customers search for products and services within your geo location boundaries.
Integrating Web Design and SEO
Early Collaboration:
Web designers and SEO specialists need to work closely together from the start to ensure that the website is engineered in harmony to be optimized for both user experience and search engine visibility.
Visual Hierarchy:
Using visual elements like headings, spacing, breadcrumbs and separators to visually present the content in a user-friendly manner that will rank the content higher in search results.
Website Speed & Performance:
Optimizing the assets, javascript files, stylesheets, images and other media as well as other technical programming aspects and platform-related optimizations will ensure faster loading times and better performance, which translates into higher rankings.
URL Structure:
Using descriptive and user-friendly URLs that reflect the actual content of the page is a critical ranking factors.
Content Strategy:
Creating an effective content strategy that aligns with user search intent and search queries will provide much value to the audience and ranking of the website content.
By integrating web design and SEO services together and engineering both components in parallel, businesses can create websites that are visually appealing, user-friendly, and highly ranked and discoverable by their target audience, leading to increased organic SEO traffic flow, user engagement, and optimal conversions