There are a multitude of different things to look for when on the hunt for a new website. Whether it’s for your business or own use. Here are 5 things to look for when seeking a potential web design / development agency.
How does SEO work?
Search engines use bots to crawl through your website’s pages and collect information which is then placed in an index. This index is then searchable on Google and that is how you get your search results. For example, if you search for “website design” Google is going to display all of the information it has in it’s index for “website design” and display it to you in the form of search results.
Now, I am guessing your next question is going to be “so how does Google determine who displays first, second, third etc in search results?”. This is where search engine optimisation comes into play. Google uses a number of ranking factors to determine which website gains the right to display its information at the top of the search results. The better your SEO, the higher your website is going to display in search results.
Why do I need SEO?
As I mentioned before, the better your site’s SEO is, the higher you are going to display in search results. The higher that you display in search results, the more organic traffic you are going to receive from Google search. It’s almost like having a source of traffic to your website, without having to lift a finger. Google manages around 5.6 Billion searches per DAY, so the chances of someone searching for your services or products are pretty high. That being said, they will most likely click on one of the first five links that they see on the search results page. So if your website is not up there, then you could be potentially losing out on a lot of organic traffic to your website.
What are some of the ways I can improve my website’s SEO?
There are an endless number of ranking factors that Google uses and they are always changing, adding & removing rankings factors. Here are four of the most up to date rankings factors for early 2022.
- Use Meta tags & Alt tags
- Ensure your website is mobile friendly (70% of Google traffic comes from mobile)
- Make sure your website is fast and lightweight. (Loads fast & isn’t clunky)
- Ensure your sites content is easily readable
Although these are just a few of the rankings factors Google is currently utilising at the moment, get on top of these and your site will definitely be in better shape than before within Google search results. Let’s break these down. Using meta tags and alt tags is a must. For example, whenever you publish a page on a website, insert a meta title and description. You may have heard a lot of web developers out there say “build for mobile first” over the last few years. They aren’t saying this for no reason, the vast majority of the search traffic we are seeing these days is coming from mobile. So it is more important now than ever to have a website that is fully mobile compatible otherwise search engines are not going to treat your website too well within the rankings.
If you are looking to build your website or do a rebuild. Then ensure you are not overbuilding it. By this, I am talking about keeping the “fancy” bits to a minimum and not having more pages, images and other content than what is needed. If you are building on a CMS such as WordPress, then keep the plugins and other files to an absolute minimum. Too many times have we seen sites that are bloated with a large number of unnecessary plugins, pages, images which are not needed or in use. At the end of the day, this is just drastically slowing the website down and in turn affecting rankings. Last but not least, ensuring the content on your site is readable is incredibly important. For example, Google recently announced that sites using font sizing under 14px are classed as “unreadable”. This combined with font colouring and hard to read fonts will be heavily affecting your websites readability and therefore affecting your rankings within Google.
If you are in the market for a new website, then flick us a call or fill out the contact form and we can have a chat!
