Month: June 2024

10 Best Website Design Practice For Small Business

10 Best Website Design Practices for Small Business Success

Leave a Comment / Website Design / By Ecsion

Website design practices have gone through an evolution process over the years. Every year brings forth advancement or improvement in website design practices. Let’s get more practical here, shall we? Envision the last time you saw an old-school HTML-built website ranking highly in search engines. I bet you can’t actually do it. If you can, then you can admit that it was way long ago.

New practices, new standards, and just about new everything else emerge regarding website design over years. As such, websites have had to continuously change and evolve to stay current with the trends. Your website’s effectiveness today largely depends on website practices that you adopt.

If you want to stand out and be apart from your competitors in the current competitive market, you need to throw out outdated web design trends. Now is the time to give search engines what they want and give your users what they are looking for. You risk losing leads to your competition if your website is not up to par. And you don’t want that, do you?

Well, if you are in a situation close to this, you are in the right place. We provide you with the best practices for website design that will significantly impact your website’s relevance.

Best Website Design Practices For Small Business

1. Make a user-oriented design

Your primary target when designing your website is your leads, which will eventually convert into sales. With this in mind, you should be able to develop a website that attends to your users’ needs. The user experience should be impeccable.

What exactly do we mean by “User Experience?” Commonly abbreviated as UX, User Experience is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product. You achieve this by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction.

To put it simply, your customer’s needs should be your priority when designing your website. How so? Make it simple. Make it easy to use- a website that will allow visitors to quickly and efficiently interact with it. One that will keep them visiting again and again and again until they make purchases.

If you settle for a poor design, you risk sending your visitors back to where they came from. You miss the chance to attract potential leads, some of who may convert to sales. Creating a helpful website with original content will fulfill your visitor’s needs. It should be a usable website, one which is easy to navigate.

Not just on desktops or laptops, no. A good website design should provide smooth access even on mobile devices. This is especially important because a lot of users nowadays access various websites through their mobile devices.

A desirable website will attract visitors. Take a look at your creation. Do your brand and website elements speak about you and your business in the best way possible? How about credibility? Does your website represent you as the industry authority that people can turn to and trust?
See, it is not just about coming up with a website. You must keep all these things in mind while developing your website to help you stay focused on what matters the most- your visitors.

2. Identify your target audience

Any time you develop your website, you need to know who your target audience will be. Before going into the details of the website, you must know who you are targeting. This will help you create a website that will best serve your audience. Crucial information like demographics, buying habits, income, and occupation will help you meet your audience’s needs to the latter. You should be able to analyze even your typical site visitor’s pain points, hobbies, and interests.

Such kind of data will help you understand the specific characteristics of your target audience. In turn, you will be able to know what exactly your audience wants from your site. You will know the site’s components that are critical for providing your audience with the best experience.

Additionally, you will be in a position to the way between information that is more important to your audience and how you can retrieve the same and get it to them. Your audience’s knowledge is one of the fundamental best practices of website designing when looking to build an effective website.

3. Embrace Consistency

In anything you are taking part in, consistency is critical. It does not matter whether you are building a business or a website. What will keep you going till the end, or rather the peak, is consistency.

Consistency is what differentiates a loser and a winner in any field. This means that regardless of your story or history, your branding cohesiveness across all your platforms is crucial. That applies to your website too. Why is this vital?
You see when people are researching or looking across products. They are more likely to go to a website that:

- Evokes familiarity.
- Is visually appealing.
- Looks trustworthy.
- Aligns with them and their beliefs or personality.

When your website achieves all the above, you are more likely to get more visitors. More visitors mean more leads. And more leads mean a higher conversion rate. How then do you ensure consistency with your branding? Simple: Keep your branding in line with your business and your customers. Do this by ensuring that your website has the same logo, uses the same motto, uses the same colors, and has the appropriate personality and tone in the content.

Keep in mind that your business or website’s size does not really change the importance of branding. Ideally, branding is essential for everyone. By being consistent, you will help people quickly identify and remember you across all your platforms.

4. Provide an insightful navigation

Let me begin by helping you understand how critical your navigation bar is. You have your website in place. Depending on your offer’s services or products, chances are that your website has more than one page, right? This means users have to go through pages one at a time to see what you are offering.

One of the best practices for website design is creating organized and functional navigation. Your navigation bar is critical in helping your users find information fast.

Rather than having a generic tab that includes all your products, it will be very beneficial that you break it down into smaller tabs. Ensure that you use the correct headings to separate your information effectively when creating your navigation.

Another thing you should factor in is that your navigation should be simple and easy to follow. No one wants to spend loads of time trying to familiarize themselves with your navigation when they can find a better option out there, right? It is essential that your users can find the product category that is of relevance to them. At the same time, they should see the subcategories of different types of products that fall under the main category. All these, they should access with ease.

5. Make use of negative space

Utilizing negative space between your design elements and content provides breathing space for your website. It allows you to present your website in an appealing and catchy manner. Leaving ample padding space between text images and headings will go a long way in helping you achieve this kind of look.

You do not want to overload your website with text and visuals when building it.

Often, crowded pages will leave your audience feeling confused and overwhelmed. Some users may even leave your website altogether. Negative space will help keep your audience focused when visiting your pages. It will allow them to browse through your site with ease.

6. Maintain Familiarity

When it comes to your Call To Action, you must avoid distracting your users with different shapes or colors. Your users want to experience some kind of familiarity when visiting your website. Take an example of Amazon’s website.

You do not see their website using different colored “Add To Cart” buttons, right? Well, that tells you something. Try experimenting to find a good balance of color and shape that attracts the visitor’s eye and stick with that which works best for your website.

7. Focus on Writing Better Website Content

Your website’s content is no doubt the most crucial factor when it comes to converting visitors and appealing search engines. While this may be the case, it can be challenging to balance the two. Here, we look at some of the practices you can adopt to achieve this balance:

A. Write the Content on Your Service Pages For Converting Visitors

Creating high-quality content on your service pages will go a long way in helping you gain higher conversions. How so? Typically, people will visit your service pages to learn more about your company and the services you offer. Consequently, high-quality content on the service pages will help your visitors determine the following:

- The service or product offered.
- Some of the features of the services or products offered.
- What do you do to provide the service or product?
- The benefits of selecting you for this product or service.
- How to contact you?

The best thing you can do is push to highlight the benefits of your service and not just focus on the features. That’s because focusing on the features of your product or service will put you on the same level as every other website or business in the same industry. Try describing your service by pointing out the benefits of your service. In doing so, you stand a higher chance of converting your visitors to customers.

B. Write Educating Content On Your Blogs For Visitors

People usually visit blog posts to seek answers and more in-depth information regarding a topic. That says a lot about the importance of having a website with blogging capabilities.

If yours does not have this feature, it may be time to consider a change. When done in the right way, blogging is the key to increasing your rankings on search engines. It is one of the ways you can achieve loads of free organic traffic in search engines.

However, if your blogs are too shallow, self-promoting, and are targeting keywords, you will find yourself not ranking unless you are investing some very serious effort. Your blogs should be relevant to your business. It should be uniquely crafted, one that provides in-depth and valuable content without being too self-promoting. Below are some of the typical and well-performing blog topics that you may want to consider:

- Answers to frequently asked questions related to your business, services, or products.
- Guides to some of the things that your customers may be interested in learning or doing themselves.
- Comprehensive information related to a specific service or topic that you would otherwise not be able to include on your service page.

Providing this kind of content in your blog posts will help educate your customers. Additionally, you will be able to increase your brand awareness. At the same time, your website will rank higher and reach even broader audiences in search engines. You may want to consider some additional content writing tips listed below:

- Incorporate keywords and onsite SEO in your content. These two are very crucial to both service pages and blogs. Go even further by making sure that you are researching and implementing the two correctly. If you cannot do it by yourself, get a professional to assist you.
- Make use of proper headings to bring about a clear distinction between the different sections of your content.
- Make your content sound natural, especially when read aloud.
- Use an easy-t-read font style and font size.
- Use short paragraphs.
- Utilize bullet points in displaying items that would otherwise be separated using commas.

8. Design call to action (CTA) buttons that stand out

Having CTA buttons on your website will help your audience know how to proceed in the buyer journey. People will typically browse through your site to learn more about your products and service. As they do so, what they see will determine their next steps. Without the CTA buttons, your audience will not know what direction to take.

Because of this, you need to create CTA buttons that stand out so that your audience does not miss them. CTA buttons will help guide your audience whether you want them to sign up for an email list, contact your business, or buy a product.

9. Optimize your website for mobile

One of the most critical best practices for web design is having a mobile-responsive website. Over 50 percent of the internet traffic comes from mobile. Consequently, you must offer a site that works efficiently and effectively on handheld devices.

This practice is crucial for your website- it will help boost user engagement and earn you more conversions for your business. Statistics show that more than two-thirds of users are more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly company.

A great way of making your site look great on mobile is by integrating responsive design. This feature will enable your site to adapt to whatever device a user uses. This means that regardless of whether a user uses a mobile phone, a laptop, or a desktop, they can still access your site effortlessly. Your website will fit just fine on any device being used.

If you are looking to provide a better experience for your audience and hoping to keep them engaged with your site, creating a mobile-friendly website should be one of your primary concerns.

10. Ensure search engine optimization for your website

If you want to improve your ranking in search results, you may need to invest in search engine optimization (SEO). SEO involves optimizing your website to rank in relevant search results. Some of the SEO strategies include:

- Quick site loading.
- In-depth research and optimization of relevant keywords.
- Ensuring your site is mobile-responsive.
- Coming up with content that drives traffic to your site

Ensuring that your website is optimized will come in handy if you will put the time and effort into building your beautifully designed site. Even more, you should keep your website’s onsite SEO up to date. Search engines like Google are consistently updating their algorithms and standards when it comes to analyzing and ranking websites. Because these updates can occur multiple times in a year, they can significantly increase rankings for millions of websites.

Avoid any potential severe drops in rankings by keeping your website’s SEO to current standards. This way, you will also be avoiding the loss of traffic to your site.

Take-out

About 50% of people acknowledge that a website’s design is their number one key factor in determining the credibility of a business. Suffice to say, updating your website to factor in the best practices for web design is worth your time, effort, and money.

It is time for you to reinvest in your website to stay current with website design practices and industry standards. It gets even better because most of these best practices have been covered here. If you find making a lot of changes to your website overwhelming, you can always seek professional assistance.

Meta Tags for SEO: Ultimate Guide to Boost Rankings

What are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are invisible tags that provide important information to search engines and visitors. They help search engines to understand what your content is about.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are placed in the <head> of an HTML document, so they must be coded in your content management system. Meta-tags are a great way for website owners to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and the rest of the tags are ignored.

Before we dive deep into the nitty-gritty of which meta tags to use, let’s talk about why they are so important for SEO.

Why Meta Tags are Important for SEO?

Meta tags offer more knowledge about your site’s content to search engines and website visitors. They are used to highlight the most important and unique elements of your content to make your site stand out in the crowd.

Search engines are user-centric and they prioritize a better user experience, and that includes ensuring your website satisfies every query asked by the user as fast as possible. Meta tags make sure that the information which the user wants to know about your website appears upfront in a concise and useful manner.

There are different types of meta tags having different roles, but not all are useful for SEO. Now that you know the importance of meta tags, let us see a full list of meta tags that are relevant for search engine optimization.

Types of Meta Tags for SEO

Here is the list of meta tags for SEO strategy:

Types of Meta Tags

- Meta title tags, to name your page on search engines.
- Meta description tags, to describe your web page on search engines.
- Meta robots tag, to index, or not index your page.
- Meta charset tag, to define the character encoding of the website.
- Meta refresh redirect tags, to send the user a new URL after some time, usually from a redirection.
- Meta viewport tag, to indicate how to render a page on mobile.
- Meta canonical tag, to prevent duplicate content penalty.
- Meta alt text, to provide a text alternative to images.
- Meta header tag, to provide headings.

1. Meta Title Tag

The title tag is the first thing a user notices in the search results. Titles that appear in the SERPs give readers a quick insight into the content of the results. It’s the title that offers a preview of what your content is about. It is the primary piece of information that’s relevant to a user’s search query, and it helps them to decide which results to click on.

meta title tag

Your title tag is not just for the users, but also for the search engines that discover your content. So, it is important to write high-quality title tags for your web pages.

But, how to write a title tag?

It’s simple, copy-paste the code given below into the <head> section of your web page:

<head>
<title>this is the title of your page</title>
</head>

Here are a few best practices to use Title tags on your web pages:

- Craft a unique and perfect SEO title tag for each page;
- Be brief, but descriptive and clear;
- Avoid vague and generic titles;
- Write something click-worthy and impressive;
- Use your target keywords to improve results;
- Keep it under 55 characters;

2. Meta Description

The meta description tag summarizes the page’s content. It is as important as the title tag. If the title tag is the title of your web page that appears on top of the search results, then the description tag is the snippet that is displayed underneath. They are like a pitch that interests and convinces the users that the page is exactly what they are looking for.

meta description

The meta description tag should provide a precise description of your page. Utilize this tag wisely and take more benefits of the opportunity to provide more details about your content. Make it appealing, descriptive, clear, and relevant.

You can code meta description tags manually in your site’s HTML.

An example is given below:

Here are a few best practices to use meta description tags on your web pages:

- Write a unique description for each page;
- Summarize your content accurately;
- Avoid unclear descriptions;
- Provide relevant content;
- Make it perfect and appealing;
- Include keywords where it makes sense;
- Keep it under 160 characters;
- Avoid the use of duplicate meta descriptions across multiple pages;

3. Meta robots tag

Robots meta tag tells search engines how to crawl web pages. Using the wrong robots meta tag can have a disastrous impact on your website’s presence in the search results. Your search optimization efforts rely on your understanding and utilizing this tag effectively. Meta robots tag informs search engines, which pages on your website can be indexed.

meta robots tag

It serves the same purpose as robots.txt; it is used to prevent the search engines from indexing individual pages while the robots.txt file prevents it from indexing the whole site, or small sections of the site.

A robots meta tag that tells the search engines not to index a page looks like:

A robots meta tag that tells the search engines index and follow a page looks like:

A robots meta tag is written in the <head> section of the snippet which looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />
(…)
</head>
<body>(…)</body>
</html>

If the robots meta tag is not added in the code, then by default the search engine crawlers will index and follow your page. Robots meta tags are used to make sure that the search engine spiders process each page the way you want them to.

Here are a few best practices to use robots tags on your web pages:

- Utilize robots meta-tag when you want to restrict the way search engine crawls a page;
- Avoid blocking pages with meta robots tags in robots.txt;
- Avoid rogue meta noindex, it prevents Google from indexing the page and you will get no organic traffic;

4. Meta charset tag

The charset tag sets the character encoding for the web page. It tells the web browser how the text on your web page should be displayed.

meta charset tag

The two most common character sets are:

- UTF-8 – character encoding for Unicode;
- ISO-8859–1 — Character encoding for the Latin alphabet.

To add the meta charset tag paste the given code in the <head> section of your webpage:

Here are a few best practices to use charset tags on your web pages:

- Use meta charset tag for each page;
- Use UTF-8 where it makes sense;
- Use correct syntax for HTML;

5. Meta refresh redirect tag

Refresh redirect tag is used to indicate the browser to redirect the user to a different URL after a set amount of time. Meta refresh redirect tags should not be used because they are not supported by all web browsers. They raise security concerns and confuse the users.

If you really need to add the refresh redirect tags, then paste the code given below in the <head> section of your webpage.

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5;url=https://example.com/”>

Here are a few best practices to use refresh redirect tags on your web pages:

- Avoid the use of meta refresh redirect tags unless it is absolutely necessary;
- Use a 301 redirect;

6. Meta viewport tag

A viewport tag helps to set the visible area of a webpage. It instructs the browser on how to render the web page on different screen sizes. The presence of a meta viewport tag represents that the page is mobile-friendly. Search engines like Google rank mobile-friendly websites higher on SERPs.

meta viewport tag

Users will likely hit the back button if the desktop version of a page loads on a mobile device. It is annoying and makes things hard to read. This sends a negative signal to Google about your page.

A viewport tag is written in the <head> section of the HTML, and to add a viewport tag to your page paste the code given below into the <head> section:

- Use meta viewport tags on each web page;
- Use the standard tag unless you know what you are doing;

7. Meta canonical tag

If you have identical pages on your website, then you might want to inform the search engines which one to prioritize. You can do this without incurring a duplicate content penalty – as long as you use a canonical tag.

meta canonical tag

A canonical tag in HTML looks like this:

8. Meta alt text

An alt text tag also called an alt attribute is an HTML attribute applied to image tags to provide a text alternative for search engines. Image optimization has become very important for modern SEO strategy. Your image should be visible to both search engines and users.

meta alt tag

Meta alt txt ensures both of these things: it offers a text alternative to images that will be displayed if the image doesn’t load. It also tells search engines like Google, what that image is meant to represent. Google places high value on the alt text tag. They are used to describe your visual content.

Image alt text can turn your images into hyperlinked search results by giving the site yet another way to receive organic traffic.

An alternative (alt) text tag is written as:

img src=”http://example.com/xyz.jpg” alt=””XYZ””

Here are a few best practices to use alt text tags on your web pages:

- Use informative file names;
- Keep it short, clear, and to the point;
- Use the right type of image;
- Keep it under 50-55 characters;
- Create an image sitemap;
- Use an optimal size without degrading its quality;

9. Header tags

Header tags are headings that are used to structure your page. They are the part of your content that improves user experience and ease of reading. The order of header tags high light the importance of each section, starting from h1 to h6.

header tags

The H1 tag denotes the title of the page and the h2 tag denotes the subheading of the page to break up your content.

It is usually suggested to use only one h1, while you can use more than one h2, and h3 tag.

Here’s an example of header tags:

<h1>a quick guide to meta tags in SEO</h1>

<p>paragraph</p>

<p>another paragraph</p>

<h3>1.title tag</h3>

How do Google Understand Meta Tags?

Meta tags that the Google search engine supports to control how your site will appear in Google searches are:

1. Page-level meta tags

These tags are the best way for website owners to provide Google with information about their websites. Meta tags are added to the <head> section of the HTML page which looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset=”utf-8″>
<meta name=”Description” CONTENT=”Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: £9.24, Length: 784 pages”>
<meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”+nxGUDJ4QpAZ5l9Bsjdi102tLVC21AIh5d1Nl23908vVuFHs34=”/>
<title>Example Books – high-quality used books for children</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
</head>
</html>

2. Inline directives

Independently of page-level meta tags, you can remove parts of the HTML page from the snippets of code. This can be done by adding the “data-nosnippet” attribute to one of the supported HTML tags:

- span
- div
- section

For example,

<p>
This text can be included in a snippet
<span data-nosnippet>and this part would not be shown</span>.
</p>

How to Optimize Meta Tags for SEO?

Meta tags can help search engines and users. It helps you improve the user experience and display your business information.

Here are a few ways to optimize your meta tags:

- Check whether all your pages have title tags and meta descriptions.
- Pay more attention to your headings.
- Markup your images with alt text.
- Use robots meta tags to guide search engines on how to access your content.
- Use canonical tags to avoid cannibalizing your own content with duplicate content.

Final thoughts:

Meta tags are not complicated. Understanding the meta tags above should be enough to prevent any significant SEO faux pas.

Looking to study more about meta tags?

Leave us a message in the comment box.