Top SEO tips for web designers in 2020

If you want to become a better web designer and serve your customers well, you should think about what you can do to improve your website (besides having a great design). We have left some tips and free tools to optimise your projects.

It is both funny and a little sad to realise how closely linked some areas of web design and SEO are. When SEO becomes part of web design, the whole site becomes much more user- and search engine-friendly.

If everyone made at least a little effort to understand each other better, life would become a lot easier for everyone. Communication would be smoother and projects would be completed faster and more profitably.

So, if you want to become a better web designer and serve your customers well, you should first think about what you can do to improve your website beyond a beautiful design.

Note: this does not mean you have to do all the work yourself. Spending time on these tips will help you advise your clients better, work with more people and put some of these tips into practice.

Let's take a look at 23 tips to help you get even better. We have some free tools available to help website owners view analytics, helping them fix website performance issues faster. Here we go:

1 Setting up the Google Search Console

Google Search Console - is a free tool that provides valuable information about how a website performs in search engines. It will also alert you immediately if Google detects errors on the site, so you can fix them quickly before they grow into a bigger problem.

2 Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools - is the equivalent of Google Search Console for the Bing search engine. Despite Google's dominance, Bing can still generate a good amount of traffic and often has less competition.

3 Install Google Analytics

If you are a designer and first time hearing about Google Analytics, you should definitely take the time to learn how to work with it. The data provided here will help you make better design decisions as you will know the site's target audience and how the site is being used. Connect your Google Analytics accounts with Google Search Console for even more useful data.

4 Use Google Tag Manager

With Google Tag Manager, you can manage all the tags on your website without any programming knowledge. Whenever you need to add Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Facebook pixels or anything else, you can easily do so with Google Tag Manager.

5 Create an XML folder

An XML sitemap allows you to submit web pages to search engines. They are needed to tell search engines information about the website's pages. First, check that they are on the website and that they are up-to-date. You can usually find them by adding sitemap.xml to the address.
For example: http://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml.

Fortunately, this can be done quite easily. If your site has 500 pages or less, you can use a free online generator to create a sitemap.

In just a few seconds, the sitemap will be ready and you can submit it to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. Once the map is uploaded to your site, you should get a URL: yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml.

In your Google Search Console account, click Sitemaps in the Index section of the left-hand panel. Click "Add a new sitemap", enter the URL and click the submit button.

6 Keep the site running at high speed

It is in our hands to ensure that the website we develop loads as fast as possible. Fast loading has a direct impact on the user experience. Also, remember that Google likes to promote sites with high loading speed.

We recommend you start by checking your website's current load time. You can do this with Google PageSpeed Insights or WP Engine's WordPress Speed Test.

To minimise website loading time, you can:

• Remove unnecessary themes and tools;
• Use fast-loading instruments e.g. Genesis Pro;
• Choose a hosting company that pays attention to speed, e.g. ?!?!?!?!?;
• Reduce the size of the image to a size that will be effectively displayed on the websit;
• Compress ../images to reduce file size without compromising quality, using tools such as Compressor or Smush.

Once you have made some of these changes, retest your load time to see if additional optimisations are needed. A good developer can help you identify weaknesses and improve them.

7 Check the robots.txt file

Check the robots.txt file to make sure it is not blocking site indexing.

In WordPress, go to "Settings" > "Reading" and make sure the "Prohibit search engines from indexing this site" box is NOT ticked.

Check your Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools accounts to make sure they can read the robots.txt file correctly.

8 Be careful with website architecture

Separating content and navigation by section is especially necessary for websites with a lot of content. Users respond positively when a website offers them quality navigation. This means that a good website architecture will help them navigate the web page easily, which will ultimately lead to more conversions.

Want to know how to do it? Here are some tips:

• Outline what the next step should be for website visitors;
• Ensure consistency in site navigation and design;
• Forward visitors only with relevant internal links.

9 Make the website mobile-friendly

With so many people visiting a website via mobile devices, it is very important to optimise for them. Add to this the growing popularity of voice search, mobile push notifications, SMS marketing and many others. This kind of optimisation is becoming vital.

If you are not sure whether your website is optimised for mobile devices, use Google Mobile Friendly Test.

Themes such as Elegant Themes and Thrive Themes offer mobile versions that make it easy to customise the look of the site on mobile devices.

It is highly recommended not only to use various testing tools, but also to perform "manual checks" yourself. This will help ensure that users have a positive experience when visiting the site from mobile devices.

10 Use videos

You probably know that YouTube is owned by Google, so it is needless to say that Google likes YouTube videos. Videos are ranked much faster and easier than websites. If you have the opportunity to include videos, definitely do so, as they are a great source of visibility and traffic.

If you don't want to create videos, we recommend embedding YouTube videos in sections where they are relevant. Videos help people who don't want to read long blocks of text. They also help keep visitors on the site longer, which is good for SEO!

11 Make Google Analytics your new best friend

We have already talked about the importance of setting up Google Analytics. Now it is time to roll up our sleeves and understand its mechanism and effectiveness.

Understanding website data makes you a better designer. With this data, you can focus on parts of the site with low conversion rates so you can increase them. This is why it is so important to know the following information:

• Bounce rate (to determine why you are failing to keep people on the site);
• Most popular pages (to include more offers, a clearer call to action or otherwise convert visitors);
• Exit pages (so you can see how to prevent people from leaving the site);
• Traffic sources (so you can design the website for the audience you want).

All this and more is waiting for you in your Google Analytics account.

12 Basic information on on-page optimisation

Understanding and incorporating basic on-page optimisation will help the site be successful. Of the whole list of SEO optimisations, these are usually the easiest steps. For example:

• Include the keyword in the URL (preferably at the beginning);
• You can also put the keyword in the title (preferably also at the beginning);
• Put the keyword several times in the text (it is especially important to mention it at the beginning of the first paragraph);
• Use header tags - an H1 tag for the header and H2 tags for all the subheadings;
• Optimise ../images;
• Add links to 3 reliable websites relevant to your topic;
• If possible, include at least one internal link.

13 Conduct a site audit

A website audit is an overall analysis of a resource. Its purpose is to identify technical problems in the site's operation to improve its features for search engines and users. Often, the audit is used to find the reasons why the site cannot reach the top of the search engines.

The audit allows to:

• get the site's statistics;
• find the errors and their causes;
• optimise the cost of promoting the site;
• receive recommendations on how to improve usability, conversion rate and sales.

14 Create your own 404-error page

Sometimes a website gets broken links and pages with errors. But that is not why we want to lose our visitors. Such a page may contain references to the homepage, the search bar, links to other popular pages or contacts. It always makes sense to create your own 404 page in a style that matches the overall design of your site.

15 Install SSL certificate

An SSL certificate allows you to change a website's URL from http:// to https://. If a website raises a security warning for visitors, they are more likely to leave the site. Installing an SSL certificate helps build trust between the website and the visitor (Google recommends it). Many hosts, such as WP Engine and SiteGround offer a free SSL certificate.

16 Use SEO plugins

If SEO optimisation is not to your liking, install a plugin. Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack or The SEO Framework will work for you. They will help identify any weaknesses in your site. It is also worth taking the time to understand how to choose and use the right keywords.

17 Make your content readable

It is no secret that content is essential for a website. It should be easy to read, which is the job of a web designer. There should be contrast between the text and the background colour. The font size should be large enough to be easy to read. Spaces, line height, ../images, videos, bullets and other formatting help make the content more readable.

18 Gain the trust of website visitors

An easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate website will help gain visitors' trust. For SEO to be truly effective, a website must first gain visitors' trust.

This can be done by adding:

• A clickable phone number in a prominent place;
• Reviews;
• Add photos of team members;
• SSL certificate settings (see above).

19 Making ../images search engine-friendly

Google understands words, not ../images. So if you name an image, describe it (with keywords if possible). Use a dash to separate words.

20 Add alt attributes to ../images

This will help visually impaired visitors understand what is shown in the image and help visitors with devices that do not display the image understand what has been shown.

21 Understanding of headers

Your page may have several H2 headings that you use to highlight sub-topics, but only one H1 heading that appears in your page header.

22 Use SEO-friendly (and visitor-friendly) URLs

Although search engines can index and rank even ugly URLs, don't forget to include keywords and directory structure in the URL.

In WordPress, this is easy to do by going to your control panel. Go to "Settings" > "Permanent links" and select "post name" or create your own "custom structure".

23 Learn how to convert website visitors

The most useful thing a web designer can do to really make an SEO specialist smile is to learn how to convert website visitors into subscribers, leads or customers

The job of optimisers is to drive targeted visitors to the site and of web designers is to convert the traffic. After all, if the traffic comes to the site but the site does not convert those visitors, SEO is a waste.

Web designers turn SEO into profit

Understanding these topics and being able to advise clients gives you the opportunity to earn a great income:

• Partnerships through recommendations;
• SEO resale;
• Use these tips to become a better web designer and charge more for your work.

Keep this list of tips at your fingertips to improve the projects you are working on. It will improve the ranking of your sites, setting you apart from other web designers who do not consider SEO when designing!

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