The web design of your site is going to be one of the most important factors of your site. Not only will it immediately influence how someone feels about your site, it will also play a pivotal role in the SEO and search engine ranking process as well.

Thanks to the massive use and exposure of WordPress, site design and content creation is easier than ever before. Gone are the days when an individual or brand needs to hire an expensive site design or a marketing team to get their business online. WordPress also makes the process of SEO quite easy as well, thanks to powerful plugins like Yoast SEO and RankMath.

With all of this in mind, today we are going to be highlighting some of the many different factors, metrics and design tips associated with SEO and making sure your site ranks as high as possible.

Let’s get started!

Every Site Must Be Mobile Friendly Across All Devices

This one seems simple enough, but you would be surprised with how many sites still don’t load properly on Google. Even worse, some sites aren’t even fully accessible on mobile and tablet devices, which ultimately leads to not just a loss of visitors, but also of new leads and sales as well.

As important as having a mobile-responsive site is for your audience’s engagement and usage of your site, it also plays a big role in the SEO process as well. And this is something the team at Granwehr continually works on and improves for their client base. All too often, retail businesses and brands think it’s enough to just be online, but this often also leads to not having a fully responsive website.

For example, Google wants to deliver the best search results and information possible. They also provide a Mobile Friendly Tool that allows site owners to make sure their sites appear correctly on all devices. If not, Google will likely push that site lower in the search results, and might not even list their site at all.

Understand How On-Page and Off-Page Optimization Works

Most site owners have a good basic knowledge of how SEO works. In short, the better the content on your site, and the more quality backlinks you have, the more likely it is that your site will rank higher and more often in the search results.

However, this is actually just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO. As highlighted on Moz, there are two main components of SEO for every site out there, and they break down into the following.

On-Page SEO:

• Optimizing your title tags and meta descriptions
• Writing in-depth, quality content with more than 1,000+ words
• Cleaning up your site's code and minimizing outside loading
• Streamlining your site's navigation and removing clutter
• Speeding up your website and using a CDN for max speed

Off-Page SEO:

• Brand Mentions
• Commenting
• Forums
• Influencer Outreach
• Guest Author
• Broken Link Building
• Social Networking
• Social Bookmarking

And as you can see, On-Page SEO is all about the content and structure of your site, while Off-Page SEO is all about the promotion and building backlinks and social activity from other sites.

While both of these metrics are important, the best way to find success and to continually improve your search rankings and listings, is to make sure you have both your On-site and Off-site SEO efforts covered, and not focusing too much on just one over the other.

Understanding the Value of Backlinks and Proper Anchor Text

Speaking of Off-Page SEO efforts, backlink building is probably the most important factor out there when it comes to ranking higher and more often in Google. Without backlinks, your site is just sitting on the internet, and is likely to never be found.

Through the use of backlinks, Google can then see other websites and blogs linking back to your site. With these links in place, it let’s Google know that your content is worth linking to and how it provides value to others.

It’s also important to make sure you have a wide variety of backlinks coming back to your site, and are not keyword stuffing. Not all of them should be super heavy on your focus keywords. If they are, it’s a clear sign to Google that you are building backlinks on your own and that most of them aren’t natural.

In order to combat this, it’s important to build links to your site with natural anchor text. Some examples of this would be your company name, your site URL, and using natural keywords and phrases like “click here”, “source” and “read more”.

Keep Your Site Articles Fresh and Use Long-Form Content

With more than a billion active websites and blogs on the internet today, the last thing we all need is more content to clutter up the search engines. However, with the creation of more websites and blogs, more content is inevitable and just what happens across the internet on a daily basis.

The good news is, as a site owner, you don’t need to try and push out as much content as possible in order to compete with what’s already out there. Instead, it’s more about updating the content you already have in place, with the goal of making it more accurate and better than what’s already out there.

Some of the best ways to accomplish this are to create more internal links on your site to your best content, adding new and updated content to existing articles, and always making sure your most promoted and linked to content has more than 2,000 words.

And as multiple industry reports have shown, content that gets updated more often and has over 1,800+ words, also ranks more often and higher in Google.

Web Design + SEO = Winning Combination

With so many different factors in play when it comes to SEO and ranking higher in Google, it’s amazing that some websites can continually rank higher than many other sites in their niche market.

However, thanks to the ongoing algorithm changes put in place by Google, it also allows for the little bloggers and mom and pops businesses to rank against Fortune 500 companies as well.

In order to rank your site higher in Google, while also obtaining more keywords and search phrases, it’s important to follow and implement each of the methods mentioned above.

Be sure to run through the list one more time to see which methods you might already have in place, and which you are missing out on. Then, also look at your existing search rankings and where there is room for improvement.

After putting such changes in place, be sure to compare your results of today against those a month from now after your on-site, off-site, content creation and link building improvements have been made.