By Yamil Amed Abud - July 16, 2017
Exposing your website design online, and doing it right, requires a lot of knowledge, effort, and time; it’s not an easy task, a very complicated goal to accomplish in fact, especially since such involves SEO, programming, or design.
If you don’t have experience on any of these key aspects of “technology”, you wouldn’t manage your website successfully.
This is my best advice; and even though I didn’t come up with it myself, it’s in reference from the greatest minds that have shaped and changed our lives through science. Read closely:
It does not matter what you do or who you are; everyone must at least learn the basics of programming because it teaches you how to think; thus allowing you to manage your website accordingly, being this the main reason why you are still reading this article.
“Really? I have to learn all that?!” a hoarse voice echoed a room, “Ugh… ain’t nobody got time for that stuff,” said the skeptical with a blindfold, the evidence all around proved him wrong, “I’ll be alright without it.”
Let’s forget about that silly guy and start our lesson.
Here are 4 technical factors that you must know in order to lead your website design toward success.
The Art of Search Engine Optimization—SEO
This is the ultimate strategy that deals with exposing your website design on Search Engines—Google, Bing, Yahoo!
Search Engine Optimization, what does it really mean to “optimize” a website? And why did I denote it as art?
First, SEO refers to how your website adjusts to whatever Search Engines require. Let’s summarize a few of these requirements:
- High-quality images
- Fast loading speed
- Meta tags (Titles and descriptions)
- Unique and relevant content
- Permanent link structure on page titles
- Proper internal linking
Some of these may not sound familiar to you, which is fine. Since we can’t review each and one of these, let’s try to talk about number 6 in particular: Internal linking.
Internal linking is how all pages within your website design interact with one another. For instance, by following best practices, all pages in your site must be interconnected through links. Consider the following example:
Here it does not matter what page the user is in, he will be able to browse freely, moving to any page he wants from whatever location. This is important, it’s called free navigation; otherwise, it may be quite a hassle to browse through your website.
Take this example, imagine you just submitted a contact form and now you want to go back to the product detail page; however, there is no link or option available to do that. What? Now you have to click on “Home”, and then select the right product category. Oh… you still have to find THAT scarf again, ugh!
You don’t want your user to hit back 7 times on her browser to find the product she was looking at before, do you? Of course not, she might just drop off your website right there. And look at you replying to the form submission by the end of the day; too bad she already bought the scarf on another site.
Internal Linking represents so little when compared to the large work-scope required to optimize a website design. I don’t want to discourage anyone, yet rather establish a solid perspective of how much work is actually involved in SEO.
Adapting a site to the countless requirements Search Engines demand; now, that’s what I call art.
On the other hand, we have just seen one side of the story. Since we are talking about search engines, it’s time to review how these behave when analyzing or crawling through the web.
Search Engines Behind the Scenes
Crawling is the term we use to describe how Search Engines examine your website along with numerous others throughout the web. These web crawlers that Search Engines use are sometimes referred to as spiders, hence the fun-looking cartoon in the image.
This spider, which is a great way to picture internet bots, crawl through your website detecting and reporting whatever these are programmed to by their Search Engine.
To mention a few among the bunch, Google may detect:
- Error pages
- Content plagiarism (Text, image or video.)
- Duplicated content
- Evaluate pages based on themes or topics (Florist, jewelry, insurance, etc.)
- Evaluate Ads on a page (Number, size, etc.)
Anybody building and managing a website must be aware of how every search engine work; a website must include whatever these “spiders” are looking for. Briefly speaking, if a spider doesn’t like your website you won’t be displayed on Google.
SEO: Smart Investment for the Long-run
As mentioned above, I’m not looking to discourage anybody by throwing out so much information at once.
This is why my advice is often the following: Hire experts that will help you build, manage, and optimize your website design for the long-run. Do not consider this an expense, but rather an investment. Remember there’s just too much at stake here, this is your business!
Every business owner I have worked with is either too busy or do not know much about how to optimize a website. Whatever the case might be, SEO is as important as any other investment in your business.
You can hire experts to help you right here.
A Responsive Mobile Experience
If you are still not convinced how complicated Optimizing a website may become, we’ll discuss what’s required to have a website design responsive.
Technically, we may define the layout and structure of a responsive website by using a series of codifications, and specific programming languages—CSS and HTML respectively.
These are responsible for the creation and formatting of all pages; taking into account colors, margins, fonts, heights, background, positioning, etc.
As a result, you obtain:
- Fluid Layouts, content, and images; adaptable for all screen sizes
- Avoid duplicates in your content.
- Web development time reduces.
- User interaction improves.
- Prospect customers are more likely to buy or request your service
The web development team at Elite Online Media offers the greatest value on website designs, adapting sites not just for different screen sizes, but also to your business needs.
Learn more about responsive websites here.
What We Learned Today
Exposing your website online won’t lead your business toward success by itself.
Regardless of your business or industry, you must learn the basics of how your website functions to optimize it—SEO is the best way to improve site performance over time.
As we talked about internal linking, we understood how important it is to deliver free navigation within the right design. Out of everything discussed, here are some other highlights:
- Learn how your website functions.
- Learn the basics of optimizing your website; what SEO really involves.
- Learn more about Search Engines—Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.
If you have spare time, keep doing more research about these crucial aspects about exposing your business online.
Remember, you are a business owner who may be too busy to handle all of this information. I highly recommend hiring experts who may outperform this process from the start. Making the right investment at the beginning may set the difference between failure and success on the long-run.
Acquire a new website today, including SEO services and website management, all under one single team of experts. Find the help you need right here.
