5 top Web design tips to increase website traffic

Since performance and speed are important to SEO (and therefore website traffic originating with organic search), Web design plays a crucial role in how well a website ranks in search results on Google and other search engines.

As a result, great Web design can have a dramatic effect on your business and how you make money online.

By implementing a few design improvements that leverage the latest Web technologies like CSS3, responsive Web design for mobile support, HTML5, and more, you can derive potentially large gains for very little effort.

This article discusses 5 great Web design tips that will help your blog or business website drive more organic search traffic, improve the browsing experience of visitors, and ensure that you make as much money online as possible.

5 top Web design tips for increased Web traffic

I have tried to limit my Web design tips to ones that are fairly simple to implement for novice Web designers - (I failed a bit...). However, if you are completely allergic to CSS and HTML, then you might want to get in touch with your Web designer and get them to make these design changes.

1. Replace background images with CSS3 background gradients

Does your website still use background images? Images are large and chew bandwidth; slowing down your website.

In almost all cases, background images can be replaced with modern looking, attractive, and lightweight CSS3 gradients.

What's more, you don't even have to know anything about CSS3 in order to use it.

Head over to one of my favorite Web design tools, Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator. This will allow you to create cross-platform CSS using a graphical interface. All you need to do is copy and paste the new CSS code into your own style-sheets, and away you go.

2. Replace Images with text

Does your website use an image to display the site title? Do you use images to display written information?

Not only are images large and unwieldy, but they also hide valuable SEO information from Google and other search engines. Using an image as header text is fine for a human, but not for the search engines because they can't "read" images like we can.

Convert your text images into header text (i.e. <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, etc) that contains important SEO keywords and phrases, and you'll soon notice page rank improvements in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

For more information on using SEO keywords, check out How to research SEO keywords: Five SEO tips from top SEO experts

3. Implement responsive Web design

Does your website support mobile devices? This is arguably the most important Web design update that all bloggers and businesses will have to do in the near future.

Mobile access to the Internet will soon outpace PCs. In other words, more people visiting your website will do so from a smartphone or tablet. This makes mobile Web design an imperative.

Unfortunately, responsive Web design is not straightforward, and I wouldn't recommend you try it yourself unless you are a real expert (you have a business to run anyway, right?).

There are several different methods you can use to implement responsive Web design for mobile support. Check out 3 ways to upgrade to a mobile website with responsive Web design for a discussion of each.

4. Replace JavaScript with CSS3 transitions

As a general rule, avoid using JavaScript if you can - it can hide important content from search engines, slow down your site, degrade badly, and generally lead to slow and poor browsing experiences.