What is the Secret to the Design of a High-ranking Website?

Good SEO doesn’t just happen. You need to include it in your website design from the very first step. There are many CMS platforms and website builders that claim search engine friendly qualities, but then again, that’s the least your competitors are getting as well. You need something more robust, that commands search engines to come check your website out and drive traffic. You cannot settle for the bare minimum. You need a complete package that covers site design, page load time, content quality and HTML structure.

Instead of building a website on rickety platforms that are not so sure about SEO, why don’t you start with a site builder meant for optimization? We have seen this makes a world of difference when it comes to the final site optimization. Think about it, when your platform for optimization is high, you will need less amount of patchwork to get your website going.

Choosing a builder for SEO

Almost all the traditional website design platforms do a decent job of including essential features of search engine optimization in their software. Each builder has its USP. So choosing one becomes severe, especially since there are at least a hundred popular choices we can list right here.

Our advice is, look around and figure out what your website needs. What is it that you envision for your future company site? Do you want the bang for your buck? Do you want exclusivity? Do you want the whole package irrespective of how much it costs?

In our experience, most of the times, website owners need to know about the features of a standard SEO software before they should choose the right platform and package.

Learning about SEO

We can start with the comprehensive guide to SEO, but we are sure you have already heard it to ad nauseam. So let us just list a couple of things that are a must when you are trying to choose a comprehensive platform for your website. Here are the things you need –

1. Content with keyword optimization
2. Management of metadata (meta tags and meta descriptions)
3. Media management and optimization
4. Internal linking
5. External linking

Every website platform should provide these SEO basics. If you have these, you are ready to proceed to the next steps.

Testing for optimization

We trust SEMRush for all kinds of SEO testing. Just enter your domain and find out how your website is performing. You can use directed searches, keywords, and backlinks too. In fact, see how your competitors are doing before you go ahead and draw conclusions about your website performance.

There are other tools as well that you can use for testing optimization including WooRank, Open Site Explorer, and PageSpeed Insights.

You must always remember that Google has an honest take on your website popularity. Google only ranks the favorite sites on the 1^st SERP.

So we thought of carrying out a closed research on the SEO of the modern website builders. Here, we focused on e-commerce website builders only and ranked them by SEO. The result was as following –

1. Shopify
2. Weebly
3. BigCommerce
4. Wix
5. Yola

The basic SEO of these platforms will play a critical role in determining your website optimization as well. Most website developers do not think this fact to be important enough. However, this will play a significant role in how Google ranks your site.

Customization options

Your website on-page optimization is the next most important step in website building. You want all the goodies, plus the flexibility that will enable you to include your signature. Your admin should have enough control to be able to edit the following features –

• H1 title tag
• Website and web page URLs
• Image Names and Alt Tags
• Canonical tags
• Meta descriptions and meta tags

Regarding optimization flexibility, we observed that BigCommerce deserves the #1 rank among all e-commerce site builders. This is one platform that has all the elements a modern website may need. It has responsive templates, added shortcodes, multiple layout options in addition to all that, BigCommerce also has tremendous flexibility. Next in line is Shopify. This one is a definite contender. If you want to pick a website builder for overall ease in website building and customization options, go with Shopify. It has a broad range of extensions that you can choose, buy, install and activate.

Rankings: demystified

At the end of the day, Google has to “understand” what your website is about and what you are trying to tell your customers. You may have already noticed this trend among high-ranking sites. Almost all of them are easy to understand, navigate and follow. They are interesting, and they can easily convince a visitor to become a customer.

This is exactly what your website needs. An impressive power that is simple yet elegant. Your website needs organic traffic. PPCs and other social media promotions come much later. First, your site needs to attract Google search engine bots. You should consider going AMP. The Accelerated Mobile Pages secure better ranks as compared to their non-mobile page counterparts.

Sticking to the basics

Forget about flashy animations. Although we are hearing whispers about Google learning to read JavaScript, we have not seen the certification yet. So we say, let go of those animation effects and large images. Stick to the more conventional and more secure text only. Larger images will slow your website down, and that can be the deal-breaker for a new website like yours.

Make sure your website is appealing. It should highlight the right content. For example – if you are launching a new fashion brand, make sure you put the relevant HD images in the header and add the promotional offers as well. Nothing works better than responsive headers and banners with active links.

People still love well-organized content. And if you cannot decide what platform to pick since all of them are offering such similar features, just pick one and stick to the tested basics of SEO. This should do the trick for your website and keep it at the top of relevant search result lists.