10 Real-World Reasons Designers Should Know SEO

For web designers today, creating a website can mean a whole lot than just functionality, usability and aesthetic appeal. Today, every new-born website requires a thorough integration of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) protocols to become crawlable and get indexed by search engines such as Google.

A good website can attract great amounts of traffic. However, to make sure your traffic is relevant, geo-specific, and hails from the target segment, you must utilize SEO properly. According to one piece of HubSpot research, 77% of people research a brand before getting in touch with it. This means your site design, structure, content, and marketing practices must be spot on if you want spectacular search results!

Both off-page and on-page SEO are imperative to the ranking process for any website on Google. Here, we are going to discuss why web designers should know about on-page SEO well enough to create a website that not only attracts visitors, but also ranks on top of Google search engine result pages (SERPs).

1. Higher Rankings

On-page SEO involves many elements such as HTTP status code, URLs and their friendliness with the search engine. Other aspects include the correct addition of meta tags, descriptions and further heading tags on your search link on Google SERPs. All of these elements make a huge difference in on-page SEO. Therefore, a web designer who knows these details must know when to apply them in the right order so that the website receives higher rankings on Google.

2. Greater Search Accuracy

With the growing number of internet users, the demand of the data has also increased. There are so many brands for a similar product, over hundreds of online stores, and numerous branches of the same brand. Before any potential customer makes an appearance in a store, they are highly likely to search them on the internet. The statistics clearly support this as 18% more shoppers prefer Google over Amazon for searching a product and 136% of times a search engine is preferred over other websites for the same purpose. Similarly, local searches lead 50% of the mobile users to take a tour to the nearby store within 24 hours. This further necessitates web designers to readily know about on-page SEO so that the client’s business page is more visible on web.

3. More Mobile Traffic

The state of inbound reporting suggests that generating traffic is one of the main marketing challenges faced by website designers and marketers. Website designers have the opportunity to integrate SEO metrics from the start and not only make the website more user-friendly, but device responsive as well. According to marketing technology facts by Sweor 57% of the mobile users abandon a brand’s website if it has a poor mobile responsive website. SEO helps you improve these flaws and add in high-quality visual content for better marketing. Designers can use this to their advantage and focus on building an attractive, rankable and responsive website.

4. Higher Engagement

In the present era, every online brand is reflection of how far up it is on Google rankings. On-page SEO helps build a strong network of internal linking that keeps the user engaged on the website by offering them more valuable information on the right time.

It also helps brings exposure to those sectors of the website that need more attention and helps generate a positive user experience from the visitor. This helps the brand focus on its goals and deploy different marketing strategies to boost revenues.

5. Impartial Benefits for SMEs

While large businesses may dominate the small ones in terms of size, operations and employee strength, SEO does not discriminate between SMEs and Large enterprises. SEO does not require a sizeable investment and most entrepreneurs and SMEs can afford hiring a few resources or even build their own department. However, SMEs with constrained budgets may not be able afford a dedicated department for SEO. Therefore, web designers must know SEO beforehand since there is no guarantee they will get any guidance from the company when the website gets live.

6. More Quality Traffic

Designing a website with proper on-page SEO helps Google’s spiders to crawl through your URLs faster and index your pages more relevantly on their SERPs. Research conducted by Moz suggests that 71.33% of clicks made on a website are present on the first page of search results. This means that more and quality traffic would be driven to your website generating more leads, increasing the conversion rates and ROI as well.

7. Using Innovative Technologies

Content has a direct effect on your customers. According MindMeld, 60% of the users have started using voice search features to interact with search engines when making queries. This means that the designers now need to optimize the website and content for voice search as well. According to Backlinko, the average word length that helps rank the website in the first page of Google is 1890 words. Also, the use of most suitable keywords gives your website ranking a boost bringing it on the first result page of the search engine. To get more advanced SEO features, web designers also deploy SEO extensions for more optimized performance and cost effectiveness.

8. Increases Page Loading Speed

Every website designer knows that loading speed plays a deciding role in online rankings as well as user experience. Some of the factors that lower the webpage speed are the large images, bad URLs and coding, and themes with too many widgets. Thus, knowing on-page SEO helps the designer avoid such errors when designing the website, improving its loading speeds far more efficiently as compared to when it is operational.

9. Greater User Experience

You must be wondering how SEO improves the UX, right? Well, good SEO offers informative, readable and highly usable content to the readers. Also, it helps to design a visually attractive website that is nicely navigated and performs well. These features make users happy and enhance their experience on the web page. So if you’re planning to leave a long lasting impression right from the start, you must put in some on-page SEO from the beginning.

10. Cost-Effectiveness

Its irrefutable that SEO has a great cost advantage. A skilled web designer knows how well systematic integration of on-page SEO can save costs that can pile up later if the website starts getting traffic. Everything from page titles, meta descriptions, meta tags, URL structure, body tags, keyword density down to image SEO must be prepared prior to its operation stage. Neglecting these key points can be detrimental to the website’s overall progress and may result on expensive retro-fitting at a later date.

 

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If I Had to Start All Over Again, I Would…

I started young. At the ripe age of 15 and a half, I started my first online business.

Can you guess what it was?

It was a job board. I created it because I couldn’t find a high paying job at that young of an age. Heck, I struggled to find even a low paying job!

As you probably can guess, it failed and, eventually, I went on to do other stuff.

From creating an ad agency to a few software companies… the list goes on and on.

But if I had to start all over again, what do you think I would do?

Well, before I get into that, let’s first talk about what I learned a bit too late…

What I learned too late in my career

I’m really good at one thing and one thing only.

It’s driving traffic to a site.

It doesn’t matter what industry a site is in, I can drive traffic to it and make it popular. And best of all, I can do it without ads.

But because I can do one thing well, it doesn’t mean I can create a successful business. I still need amazing people around me.

For example, when I started working with Mike Kamo, my business started to take off.

He’s the CEO of my ad agency, and typically the CEO of whatever I want to do. And if he doesn’t have the time, he finds someone who does.

See, Mike doesn’t have a college degree and he’s not your typical CEO. But he is really good at building teams and hiring the right people. And best of all, he can do so on a budget.

That is his best skill!

And working with him I realized that no matter how smart you are, you’ll never build a big company unless you have a talented team.

Sure, you can get to millions on your own, but it’s hard to get to 9 figures or even 8 figures a year in revenue without an amazing team.

People help you scale and grow fast. With more brain power, assuming you are picking good people, you’ll solve your problems faster and see revenue roll in.

So what would I do if you started over again?

Well, the lesson above is one of the hardest lessons I had to learn. And I learned it too late in my career.

It’s obvious, but when you start out as an entrepreneur at too young of an age, you make mistakes (sometimes huge ones) that you more likely wouldn’t have made if you had started your entrepreneurial journey a bit later.

So, what would I do?

Well, I would spend the first 9 years of my entrepreneurial journey in the workforce.

The first 3 years I would spend my time at a startup. And ideally, one that doesn’t have too much venture funding and isn’t taking off like a rocket ship.

The reason I wouldn’t pick a fast-growing startup is that the hardest part is making a company work and then growing it. By working at a company that has amazing traction because of timing or luck, or something that they couldn’t control… it teaches you to be creative, scrappy, and how to fight to win.

You’ll learn a lot from the startup life.

After my first 3 years in a startup, I would then spend the next 2 years working at a mid-size startup that has raised at least 10 million dollars and is growing up and to the right like a hockey stick.

This will help you understand what a fast-growing company looks like. And let me be the first to tell you, it’s not sexy… it’s very messy.

So many things go wrong and keep breaking because you are growing so fast. You’ll end up finding things like your economics may not be great, or you may be working with mediocre people because you just need to hire for the sake of filling in empty positions.

And after those 2 years are done, I would spend 2 years working at a mid-sized company. One that generates at least a hundred million a year in revenue, but less than a billion.

The struggles that mid-size companies face are different than startups and large corporations. But by being in the mix at one of these companies for a few years you’ll learn everything from dealing with politics, to how to make a slow-moving company grow, to even thinking about the big picture. Such as how bigger companies look for huge markets because they know that it is easier to own 5% of a multi-billion-dollar industry than it is to own 50% of a multi-million-dollar industry.

Last, but not least, I would spend my last 2 years at a large corporation. When I mean large, I’m talking about a company that is worth over 10 billion dollars and potentially even publicly traded.

What would you do after your 9 years as an employee?

The whole purpose of working for others is to get the right mentors and to learn how the real world works.

Entrepreneurship isn’t as glamorous as most people think. Success isn’t easily achieved and it doesn’t look like what you might think considering what so many “successful” influencers might sell you on social media.

By working with others, you’ll learn what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t work.

No matter how smart you are, you will make mistakes. Just look at people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, no one is perfect. Even the billionaires make mistakes.

But once you’ve worked for a handful of companies that are all different sizes, you’ll have a good understanding of what it takes to succeed.

You’ll have a much better understanding of common mistakes people make, such as how to avoid hiring bad people, and if you do hire them, how you need to fire them fast.

In essence, you will have learned what you should do for 9 years straight, which means if you skip all of that, it will be harder for you to be in a position to succeed for lack of experience in the real world. Sure, there is always the possibility of success without all of the experience, but it is much more difficult to become a reality.

Conclusion

Entrepreneurship looks great and is amazing. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. But before you go off and become an entrepreneur, learn from companies of all sizes.

It’s not an easy road and the last thing you want to do is fail on someone else’s dime because your reputation is all you have.

By putting in 9 hard years into other people’s companies, you’ll increase your odds of succeeding.

And when you are ready to go out on your own, hopefully, you would have met a few amazing co-founders along your journey because it takes too much time and capital to do it all by yourself.

So what would you do if you were starting all over again?

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Dogma Kills Design

It’s all in the title, really.

I am no stranger to dogmatic thinking. I was once a very religious missionary, and currently am an open source enthusiast, a web designer, and a gamer. Of all the dogmatic thinkers I’ve encountered in each of those fields, I’m not actually sure which scare me the most. Some are easily identified from a distance, but you never know who compiles their own UNIX-based OS from scratch until it’s too late.

We want to make amazing things, and/or a lot of money, and we often end up fixating rather rigidly on whatever we believe will achieve those goals

No, it’s not a one-to-one comparison, but bear with me here. I’m not saying anyone is likely to be purged in the name of free software, or because they’re on the wrong side of the Warframe vs. Anthem debate. But… it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility. Human beings in general can get a bit intense on occasion.

That’s what (I believe) dogma is, in our modern context: intense and very rigid thinking. Creative people are people of passion and drive. We want to make amazing things, and/or a lot of money, and we often end up fixating rather rigidly on whatever we believe will achieve those goals. Creative though we may be, we are not immune to the universal laws of irony.

The wonderful world of web design is thus a world of goals. We want people to engage, to interact, to stay, to buy, to tell their friends, and to be our friends if it comes to that. And then we want it to be accessible, and usable, but also based on up-to-date frameworks and it just gets confusing sometimes. To stave off confusion, we fall back on what we are pretty sure actually works. We stand our ground on a foundation of facts, and ideas that look a lot like facts, but are actually opinions.

We stand our ground on a foundation of facts, and ideas that look a lot like facts, but are actually opinions

That would be great if this weren’t an industry where the facts change on a daily basis, and everyone seems to have different facts in any case. Hold on too long to any fact or fact-like idea, and you’ll end up just being wrong.

That’s the irony of dogma. We cling to it to protect ourselves from uncertainty and the unknown. Often people cling to dogma in an attempt to shelter their communities from change. The result, of course, is stagnation. Communities, ideas, and industries that don’t evolve will always eventually die. It can take a while, but it’s inevitable.

Dogma kills thought, and halts the processes of mental evolution. Design is pretty much the visual representation of the designer’s thought process, and requires evolution to stay relevant. And so we come back to the title.

Ground Yourself With Principles, not “Facts”

Take browsers (and software in general) as the most blindingly obvious example of this principle: Internet Explorer 6 used to be nearly synonymous with the Internet as a whole. It was what nearly everyone used, and so it was the one browser you had to support. Now it’s Chrome.

As more and more browsers hit the market (there was a small explosion of them in the early-to-mid 00s), some designers and devs started asking questions like, “Well how many of these things are we actually supposed to support?”

They did not like that the answer was, “All of them, sort of.” Cooler heads then pointed out that there were ways to make sure every site you built functioned at some level in every browser. Nowadays we have names for these principles, names like: progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, and “generally not making your whole site depend on something only one browser supports right now”.

The first approach is based on a perceived fact, such as a short list of the “best” browsers to support. The second is based on the idea—the principle—that every site should work on every platform you can reasonably manage, given your resources.

For another example, remember when we stopped asking what resolutions we should be targeting and switched over to responsive design? Yeah, it’s like that. Imagine if we were still endlessly chasing “the ideal resolution”.

What about “big images sell more”? It’s a trend, certainly, but it is not a fact you can always depend on. It might be better to say, “visually arresting design sells more”. In this way, you do not limit yourself to using big images everywhere.

Accept the Fact That Facts Change, and Constantly Double-Check Your Assumptions

With your principles in place as a foundation for your design process, you’re free to follow the facts wherever they might lead you, without fear. However, that freedom comes with a responsibility: you pretty much have to be constantly double checking your information and your assumptions. That doesn’t mean you have to constantly change how you do things, just that you need to keep double checking.

Assumptions, I have found, go hand in hand with dogma as people tend to cling to things that sound true as tightly as they do to anything that actually is true. I’ve done it myself, and it’s always embarrassing when you figure that out later. Check your data, check your facts (there’s a difference, these days), and double-check your assumptions.

The First Changes I’d Make

If you ever find yourself saying anything like, “X framework/CMS/whatever is the best one out there.”, that’s it. Those are the first things I’d check. You may even be right, but you likely won’t be right forever. And even then, whatever you think is “the best thing” may not be “the best thing for the job”.

Check your data, check your facts (there’s a difference, these days), and double-check your assumptions

Then I’d double check any deeply held beliefs you might have about “Users”. Oh, Psychology 101 isn’t going anywhere, but the way we interpret our knowledge of human nature changes over time. Again, check your data, do your research. See what users really do.

Lastly—and I know this isn’t about web design as such—this assumption that logos are better if you drain all personality from them. Plainer is not necessarily better. (Look, I know there were problems with the old Slack logo mark, but this swastika-made-of-phalli thing they have now is not the answer.)

 

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3 Essential Design Trends, March 2019

Typography, color and distinct layouts are all elements that contribute to any design project. They are also elements of design that can trend over time.

That’s exactly what we are seeing this month as bold design elements are just the things that are making certain website designs come to the forefront. Here’s what’s trending in design in this month.

Bold Serifs

Big, thick lettering can draw attention and tell a story. And that’s just what designers are doing with the use of more bold, thick serifs in projects.

Thicker letterforms are a good choice for reverse typography or in situations where there is a lot going on to compete with the words. The challenge is that bold typography can be a little overwhelming when there’s a lot of it to read.

So, you have to balance viewability with readability.

When picking a bold serif, look for something that’s a mid-range weight and not overly thick. Look for letters with a more round shape; not too tall or condensed either, to encourage reading.

While many the examples below are focused on bold serifs only, the best advice is to pair them with a less heavy option as well. (Maybe mix and match the bold and regular weights of a typeface.)

Some users will equate bold type in the same manner as all caps, assuming that it is screaming at them. You can avoid this by using bold serifs with purpose for just a few key words or phrases and balance other screen elements so that it’s not a weighty aesthetic.

While this can be a somewhat tricky trend to use, you can see from the examples below that it can work rather nicely. There’s nothing wrong with going bold when it contributes to the overall meaning and content in the rest of the design.

Red Text and Accents

It’s like I blinked and red text and accents were suddenly everywhere.

This is an accent color choice that was wildly popular at one time and quickly faded out of fashion about the time flat and material colors emerged. (Brighter reds clashed with all the other bright color options.)

But red is back.

This color choice is interesting because it is so attention-grabbing. It can also create quite an emotional bond with users. Just be aware that people can really like red or really hate it; there’s not a lot of middle ground when it comes to a color that’s connected to passion, love, anger and fear.

In each of the examples below, red is the thing that draws you into the design.

With the interactive Adidas website for Footlocker, red elements tell you where to click and engage with the game. The colors seem to “lift” right off of the movie-style video playing in the background.

Branu uses red lettering to draw you in. On a stark white background with a simple video element, it’s just sharp enough to make you stop and look.

Finally, the conference website uses red to give you the information you need over a loop of b-roll in the background. The color helps you find the event dates quickly and pinpoints a key element in the main navigation.

While all three shades of red are a bit different, they aren’t that far apart on the color spectrum. Use of red is bright and saturated. It’s the hue you think of first and that toddlers first learn to color with. (There’s no softening this color trend right now.)

More Split Screens

At a glance split screens aren’t new. We’ve been talking about – and loving on – this website design trend for a while now. And this is one concept that seems to keep getting better with time.

The latest iterations of split screen designs are more aesthetic than stacked for responsive functionality (although that’s a distinct bonus).

Split screens aren’t stuck in perfectly symmetrical patterns either. None of the examples below features a perfect split – unless it is part of another element. Both ATB and Yusuf Ozturk’s sites feature animations within the split screen so that the screen elements actually shift to highlight content or interactivity.

ATB use hover action to move the screen left and right as users choose which path to take with the design. It’s a clever way to connect the human or machine learning experience.

Ozturk’s site opens with a center split screen with a brain in the middle; hover actions revel design on one side of the brain and development on the other to showcase what’s you’ll find in the portfolio site. The animation is clean and sharp, and you can actually get caught playing with it for a while.

VM Consulting has a more traditionally designed split screen but uses the right side as a giant navigation menu. The heavy blue side paired with the lighter navigation is brilliantly balanced and easy to understand. (The color palette helps make this design shine as well.)

Conclusion

Are these design trends just right or too bold for your projects? While I love everything about split screen designs, I’m not 100 percent convinced when it comes to thick serifs and red accents. (These just seem to need more sparing use to me.) What do you think? Let’s start a conversation.

What trends are you loving (or hating) right now? I’d love to see some of the websites that you are fascinated with. Drop me a link on Twitter; I’d love to hear from you.

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Popular Design News of the Week: February 18, 2019 – February 24, 2019

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

Visualize a Website

 

How I Got Banned for Life from AirBnB

 

Why Parallax Scrolling Needs to Die

 

I Redesigned the Website Startmunich.de – The Conversion Rate Went up by 1.400%

 

What Defines Good UI Design?

 

5 Alternatives to Material Design

 

Spoofing Google Search Results

 

To Grid or to Flex?

 

Amino: Live CSS Editor for Chrome

 

First .dev Domains Go Live

 

Site Design: Peak

 

A Few Tips for Crafting your URLs for Improved SEO and UX

 

I Built a Physical Sketch Panel

 

I Made a Tool to Customise & Generate Common SVG Icons

 

Actiondesk: Workflow Automation

 

Web Usability: Importance of Fold in Web Design

 

Don’t Burn my Eyes. Mysterious Experiences. Dark Mode UI

 

The 5 Principles of Good Experience Design

 

A Designer’s Little Helpers

 

Browser-specific Hacks for Frontend Developers

 

The First Five Years: How to Stop Feeling like a Failure

 

Building the Wrong Product — 9 Antipatterns You Should Avoid

 

An Illustrated Avatar Collection for Developers and Designers

 

Museum of Failure

 

Frontiers of Design

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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