Simple Website Design
A simple website design should be user friendly to both your visitors and the search engines. This means visually pleasing and easily navigated by humans, but optimized for engine bots.
Simple Website Design For Humans
What makes your website a place people want to be?
- Valuable information
- Entertaining
- Educational
- Easy to Navigate
- Quick and Easy Action Steps
- Safe and Secure
Think about your own online experience. When you go to your online banking site, what features do you like? Is there anything that drives you crazy? Sometimes getting a simple task done requires too many steps. It might be the three clicks it takes to see your balance instead of showing up as soon as you log in.
Speaking of logging in, is the process simple while still being secure? Or do you have to go through numerous hoops just to get logged in because of a a poor security system? Apple figured this out and enabled people to pay with their phones at the press of the home button, which also reads your finger print. Simple and secure.
Maybe you site works well when a visitor is in front of their desktop computer at home. But what happens when they are on their mobile device? If your site has not been optimized for a smartphone, most visitors will be looking for an alternative to your site. If there is none, your’s might be the source of unnecessary frustration.
Simple Website Design For Bots
While your human visitors will always be the priority, there is another frequent visitor your site. It’s the web crawler or “bot” sent out look at the structure and content of your site.
Based on what it finds, you get a rank. This rank determines where your site is listed in the search results for whoever owns the bot.
That would be Internet giants like Google, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on. They have the ability to search the entire Internet to find out what is out there and what is relevant to their customer.
Since these visitors to your website are not human, you can make it easy for them to “understand” what you site is all about.
This is done through Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. In the early days, this used to be very predictable and mechanical. You do a, b, and c and you’ll get a decent ranking.
Now these bots and algorithms are so sophisticated they act more like humans. They can almost “feel” your site based on how humans are interacting with your site. Things are not so black and white for SEO folks. Creating an online business is more difficult because you can no longer develop a site to get lots of traffic early on.
Provide Valuable Content
It seems Google is more interested in legitimate established online businesses than start-ups and newcomers. A large reason is because of all the scams and frauds that used Google and other search engines to get found by people who they would take advantage of.
If you provide valuable content for your target market, you will eventually build a community of trust. Believe it or not, Google can figure this out and will reward you with better ranking.
This is also a way for Google to acquire more ad revenue through Adwords. Because it takes time to get found online, many businesses turn to Pay-Per-Click advertising to get noticed and bring traffic to their sites.