Three SEO & Web Design Concepts That Will Dominate 2017

  Three SEO & Web Design Concepts That Will Dominate 2017 Can you believe we are already 10% of the way through 2017?   Have you developed your digital strategy for the upcoming year? If you’ve only just begun integrating your online campaigns into your business – or have an already established digital plan in place – it’s important to acknowledge that the online space is always changing. What may have worked even just a year or two ago may not be as important in today’s online space.   Interested in what’s trending in Web Design in 2017?   Here are 3 of the biggest Web Design concepts you need to consider in 2017's digital strategy.   Schema Tagging   You should already be familiar with https://schema.org/ and their tagging scheme – if you haven’t had a chance to get on board, this will be a big year for this kind of data labelling to really take off. In a nutshell, the schema.org model allows you to markup your articles, products, organizations – you name it – with additional data that search engines can interpret and utilize to enrich your content for their audiences. If you tag a product appropriately with it’s price and availability information, you can potentially receive a product snippet that appears at the top of the results page and can drive additional traffic to your website, especially through mobile channels.   Have you ever typed a question into google, and seen a relevant answer appear at the very top of the results? That’s the power of schema tagging. By informing google, bing, and other search engines that your article is written by an authority and contains relevant sources and information to that specific question, you can prompt Google’s search algorithm to display your content to it’s users in a more detailed format. This can steal the thunder of even the top search results (including those paid placements!) and bring all the traffic to you.   Page Speed   People want their information fast. Now, more than ever, the expectations for the internet have significantly grown. Many people joke about ancient web design concepts that drive them crazy and force them to instantly close a site (‘features’ such as automatic music and page transitions with lengthy animations are common examples). But one particular element of a website that many people do unknowingly consider a dealbreaker is the page speed. You can have the prettiest responsive website in the world – but if it takes more than a couple seconds to load – people will never see it. Page speed is something that needs to be considered universally. That means integrated into your actual design, taken into account during SEO, and monitored effectively during live activity.   Recognizing the importance of page speed today, google has recently launched AMP pages. AMP provides a way for web designers to build static pages that are guaranteed to load and render fast – especially on mobile devices. Additionally, in the google result SERPS your page is granted an AMP symbol that lets searchers know your page will load nearly instantly. The savvy lightning bolt symbol is attractive to the eye, and can give you a leg up in improving your CTR.   Representative Social Media   Social Media has exploded in the past few years, and now multiple channels have emerged that cater to different and particular tastes online. Recently, we’ve started to see more businesses who traditionally have ignored the digital space begun appearing online in greater numbers. Usually though, this integration ends up implemented relatively haphazardly. Social Media is delegated, and often the person one speaks to on Twitter is not the same person on Facebook, or through the contact channels on their actual website.   Twitter users prefer fast, informative messages that cater to their interests and curiosity. Facebook users prefer personalized and “real” content, and more life and news related stories. LinkedIn represents a more professional representation of the business and supports a similar audience. Regardless of where you are communicating, they all expect to be remembered and for their messages to be meaningful. Having universal management for your social media helps tie your message together across multiple platforms and allows you to transfer and customize content more effectively for a particular platform.   Vestra Inet is always available to communicate or consult with you on what we can do to improve your website and your digital strategy. Look into our web design services and contact us if you are interested in further information.