Web design is a process of creating designs for websites. It involves planning, conceptualising and arranging content that is meant for the internet. Modern web design goes beyond the aesthetics of the web page, and focuses strongly on functionality as well as user experience. There are increasingly more aspects that web designers need to keep in mind when designing modern websites as the expectations of the user, as well as the devices we utilise to view websites are continuously changing. Web design that changes and adapts to the different screen sizes is referred to as responsive web design.

The main difference between web design and web development is that web designers focus on the aesthetics of the website as well as its usability. Designers consider browser behaviour and ensure the design and visual elements capture users’ attention and help to convert them into leads.

Web development, on the other hand, refers to the actual coding and programming process. Web developers use HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and other programming languages to transform the designs into a real, functioning website.

Responsive web design (RWD) is a process by which the appearance of the website is determined by the screen size and the orientation of the device. Programming a website in this way means that the elements of the website move as the viewport grows or shrinks, making the website more user-friendly.

Responsive web designs are also referred to as ‘mobile-first’ designs where the design is first produced for a smaller screen, such as a smartphone or tablet, and then adapted to larger screens. In the last decade, we’ve observed a shift towards ‘mobile-first’ designs due to the increasing number of web traffic coming from mobile devices.

With the world becoming increasingly more digitalised, your website plays a greater role in your business. It not only impacts the way your audience perceives your brand but can also help convert your website visitors into leads and eventually into sales with the correct layout and use of Call To Action (CTA) buttons and links.
Good web design will create a good first impression for the visitors and deliver your brand message clearly.

Additionally, a skilled designer will apply design principles that aid your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy by using website elements that allow you to publish content on your site, which then allows search engine spiders crawl and index your website, boosting your visibility.

Applying consistency in the design of the website elements helps to reduce bounce rate as many website visitors judge business credibility based on their web design. It also helps your audience become familiar with your brand colours and imagery.

At GLO we believe web design begins with SEO. Your web design can incorporate various elements that help your SEO rankings. One way that the SEO rankings go up is as a result of a lower bounce rate. Attractive design and carefully selected keywords reduce bounce rates.

Another aspect of web design that helps to reduce bounce rate is the user experience (UX). What this refers to is the ease with which users can navigate through your website to find exactly what they’re looking for. If the structure of the website is unclear, users are more likely to ‘bounce-off’ and search for the same information on the competitor’s website.

Optimising your web design with compressed images that load faster and social media integrations that let them distribute your content online makes their experience better. As a result, users are likely to stay on your website for longer and as a result, indicate to the search engines that your website is valid and useful for web users.

UX stands for user experience. When this concept is applied to web design it speaks of creating websites that deliver meaningful and relevant experiences to its users. Applying best UX practices when designing websites makes you consider how users interact with your website and, as a result, optimise the design to make it a smoother experience for them. This is critical as it can make a massive difference in your website’s conversion rate i.e. the percentage of website visitors that take the desired action on your website.

Conversion rate refers to the percentage of website users that take the desired action whilst on your website. For a business that sells products online, that desired action may be a user purchasing a product. For someone offering services based on customers’ needs, the desired action could be a quote request. The desired action will be determined by the business’s goals and structure of their marketing funnel.

A landing page is a stand-alone page that serves a specific purpose. A website is built of several pages, also referred to as landing pages because each of them holds specific information about an aspect of the business. Often landing pages are put together for marketing purposes and contain information specific to an offer that the business is trying to promote. These landing pages may be a way to generate leads when integrated with other digital marketing tools such as Google Ads or Email Marketing campaigns.

Web hosting is a service you need when you’re looking to have a website. The website needs to be connected to a server so that the files can be pulled up when someone types in your domain name. As a web design agency, we host websites for our clients using Siteground servers, which are one of the fastest servers available.

The digital world is constantly evolving. Many plug-ins are updated every few months. When this happens, this needs to be updated on your website and monitored for any bugs. Additionally, keeping an eye on the safety of your website to make sure no one hacks your website stealing any confidential information is a good practice. Such web maintenance tasks are best performed by an experienced web developer. At GLO, we offer web maintenance services to ensure your site is kept safe and secure.

SEO web design refers to building SEO-friendly websites which help the search engines, such as Google to understand the content of the website and as a result can improve the rankings in search engine results pages.

Building SEO-friendly websites incorporate several factors such as the architecture of the site, indexation, on-page SEO including keyword-rich high-quality content, image optimisation, heading tags, enticing meta descriptions and accurate alt tags.

As more and more people rely on search engines, building SEO-friendly websites is becoming increasingly more important. When your digital presence is optimised with an SEO strategy based on data, you are more likely to be found by your ideal audience in the search engine results pages. Furthermore, search engines such as Google throw increasingly more at web developers and marketers and as a result raise the bar for those trying to rank high. Starting to optimise your online presence with your main online asset, which should be your website is the best way to keep up with the algorithm updates.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation and is a practice of increasing the amount of web traffic that comes from organic search. SEO aims to improve the visibility of your website and drive more qualified leads to it. There are different types of SEO practices. Here at Web Design London, we believe web design and SEO complement each other. For example, you can improve the rankings of your website by reducing the bounce rate of your website. To reduce the bounce rate you need to ensure your website is attractive to the user and offers them the information they need.
There are many ways in which our experts combine SEO and web design and if you’re interested in our services, please get in touch!

Here at Web Design London, we believe building SEO on your website starts as the website enters the design phase. There are several aspects of your website design such as the sitemap, the sections you should include, the layout of the pages etc, which will directly influence how easy it is for the Google site crawlers to index your website, and how well it ranks. These fundamental aspects of SEO web design go under technical SEO, and you should cover them thoroughly. Next, you’ll want to complete your on-page SEO, which refers to SEO copywriting for each page on your website and optimising this content with H1 & H2 tags, optimised images and meta descriptions. Updating and adding fresh content to your website is important. Lastly, promoting this content and building backlinks is the off-page SEO that should be done on a regular basis.

Yes, you can do your own SEO. The downside of choosing to tackle your SEO on your own instead of hiring an SEO agency is that you will have to invest a lot of time to research and learn how to perform these different SEO practices effectively. This takes the time away from you which you would otherwise spend serving your clients or running your business. Additionally, here at Web Design London, we believe that SEO starts and goes hand in hand with web design, so unless you are building your website yourself, you would have to be in very close contact with your web developer in order to achieve the best results.
If you’d rather focus on running your business and leave the SEO website design to the experts, contact Web Design London.

Here are some of our best SEO-friendly website design guidelines:

- Index your website.
- Create a robots.txt file.
- Have redirects set up where appropriate.
- Design the layout of your pages in a way that doesn’t waste the crawl budget.
- Add a sufficient amount of high-quality content to your website.
- Use targeted keywords within your content and page titles.
- Design with responsiveness in mind (mobile-first).
- Optimise the load speed of your page.
- Design with the end-user in mind - can they find their way around easily enough?

Here is a step by step guide on how to do SEO for your website:

1. Index your website.
2. Create a site architecture and a robots.txt file to ensure you are not wasting your crawl budget.
3. Optimise your site’s load speed.
4. Set up any necessary redirects.
5. Check your website offers a good user experience (UX) & is accessible.
6. Add structured markup to the schema of your website where relevant.
7. Perform keyword research.
8. Optimise your keyword research for intent match and search entities.
9. Add high-quality content to your website on a regular basis to assert your authority & build trust with your audience.
10. Come up with a way to capture your leads e.g. with lead magnets.
11. On every page of your website assign title tags, meta descriptions & perform image optimisation.
12. Track, analyse & improve your content and rankings on a regular basis.
13. Secure as many high-value inbound links as you can & promote your content.

At Web Design London we see web design as inseparable from SEO. One way that the SEO rankings go up is thanks to users remaining on your page. Eye-catching design and strategically selected keywords reduce bounce rates. Good user experience (UX) helps, too. This refers to how easily users can navigate through your website to find exactly what they’re looking for. Users are more likely to ‘bounce-off’ and search for the same information on the competitor’s website if they cannot easily find it on your website.
Optimising your web design with compressed images that load faster and ways for the users to share your content on social media makes their experience better. Users then stay on your website for longer and as a result, indicate to the search engines that your website is valid and a useful source of information for them.

A website builder should be chosen based on the purpose of the website and how often you’re planning to update it yourself. Most website builders out there offer some sort of SEO guidance tool built within them or available as a plugin. In our opinion, WordPress websites are ones that give you many options in terms of the design and functionality as there are many plugins that are being developed for WordPress specifically. One great plugin to use with a WP website is Yoast SEO. It helps you to optimise each page on your website for search engines.

At Web Design London we like to share the workload between our team members based on their expertise. Therefore, we have several members of the team working on any of our SEO web design projects. Typically, we will have an SEO expert perform the SEO analysis and keyword research, our content specialist would deliver the copy and our web developer would bring it all together with sleek designs.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation and is a practice of increasing the amount of web traffic that comes from organic search. SEO aims to improve the visibility of your website and drive more qualified leads to it. There are different types of SEO practices.

SEM involves SEO marketing activities with some paid advertising. Some examples include Pay Per Click campaigns, local SEO, display advertising, shopping or product advertising and search remarketing. SEM and SEO strategies can be cherry-picked to match your business’s objectives.

There are plenty of SEO practices but some basic things you could look into are:
- Link building. This can be done by either publishing high-quality content on your site that others will want to share on their websites, or finding other ways to link your website on someone else's site. An example could be writing testimonials for services and products you have used in the past which get a high volume of website traffic.
- Creating content. This shows search engines you are active and keeps users on your website. This could be in the form of a blog, vlog, study or a podcast.
- Optimise meta descriptions and headlines. You need to make sure you are using keywords, the right character count and catchy phrases.
- Improve user experience. Check how fast your page is loading, if it’s optimised for mobile and whether all links are working properly.

SEO practices are important for businesses because they improve their visibility on search engines, such as Google or Bing, and in turn drive more traffic to your website. With increased traffic, there are more conversion opportunities and therefore the potential for higher sales volume.

SEO works on optimising your position within search engines, which are seen as trusted and credible sources by users. In this way, the higher your rank, the greater the perceived credibility.

At Web Design London we believe web design begins with SEO. Your web design can incorporate various elements that help your SEO rankings. One way that the SEO rankings go up is as a result of a lower bounce rate. Attractive design and carefully selected keywords reduce bounce rates.

Another aspect of web design that helps to reduce bounce rate is the user experience (UX). What this refers to is the ease with which users can navigate through your website to find exactly what they’re looking for. If the structure of the website is unclear, users are more likely to ‘bounce-off’ and search for the same information on the competitor’s website.

Optimising your web design with compressed images that load faster and social media integrations that let them distribute your content online makes their experience better. As a result, users are likely to stay on your website for longer and as a result, indicate to the search engines that your website is valid and useful for web users.

An SEO agency is a company that offers search engine optimisation services that can help your business appear higher in search engine results pages and drive qualified leads to your business.

Web Design London is an SEO agency that integrates various SEO practices, expertise and passion to produce highly-performing SEO strategies that generate more web traffic and more leads for your business.

To generate leads through SEO, experts apply several optimisation practices that not only make your website appear higher in searches but also improve the user experience and convertibility of your website. As a result, there are more qualified leads that land on your website.

SEO copywriting or writing for SEO refers to the process of planning your content, creating it and optimising with keywords that will help improve your rankings in search engine results pages. Producing SEO friendly content makes your website more attractive to search engines.

The short answer is yes, SEO does really matter. It generates a consistent stream of web traffic for your business and builds a good foundation for any future digital marketing campaigns you’re looking to run. SEO means you are playing by the rules of the major search engines which helps your rankings.

It is common to hear from agencies that SEO takes between 4 and 6 months to work. This is not untrue, however, the real amount of time it may take depends on the business, the industry and the goal in mind. At Web Design London, we base our predictions on thorough analysis and keep you updated on the progress on a monthly basis.

It is difficult to say how many different types of SEO there are. We can identify three different approaches to SEO:
1 - A white-hat approach is what GLO uses and it’s based all around using wholesome methods to improve the visibility of your website.
2 - A black hat approach is where SEO experts try to manipulate the search engine algorithms to make your website rank higher. At Web Design London we avoid this approach to SEO.
3 - A grey hat approach is somewhere in the middle. It’s not quite as bad as black hat approach but isn’t as ‘clean’ as white hat either. Again, our approach is to try and stay away from breaking the search engine rules.

Another way to categorise SEO practices is to divide it into:
- On-page SEO where the optimisation occurs on the website itself.
- Off-page SEO where optimisation is done outside of the website, e.g. via link building.