Creating a successful website is not just about optimizing it for search engines. Many websites are guilty of focusing solely on SEO, over-optimizing at the expense of design and user experience. Even Google’s algorithms emphasize the importance of quality and content, so you need to start approaching website development differently. These five steps can help you upgrade your web development strategies and create a better online experience for your audience.

Use Creative yet Simple Visuals

Modern designs require you to balance creative, simple, and engaging elements while staying true to your content and providing what your audience is looking for. You don’t have to add flashy, animated elements or textures to your website’s design. The practicality and visual appeal of two-dimensional designs with great typography and organized navigation seem to be the growing trend.

Reevaluate Your Objectives

Developing a website just because everyone has one is never a good idea. You should know what you want your website to achieve before you even start planning it. You will often come across websites with amazing, immersive designs, but simply don’t have what you’re looking for. Understanding your audience and what they’re looking for is the first step to creating a website that users will bookmark and keep coming back to.

Be specific and define goals for every page you want to include in your website. Determine what type of content goes where, and choose the most strategic spots to place your calls to action.

Produce Quality Content

Content is the heart of your online marketing campaigns, and you need to build the rest of your website around it. Your content must be written to inform and to engage, and should be in a format that is easy for your website’s visitors to read and digest. Content quality is more important than ever, so don’t let the old rules of SEO and keyword usage get in the way of creating fresh, well-written, and relevant content.

Balance Information and Technical Architecture

There has been a lot of emphasis on websites’ technical architecture, or structuring websites for better search engine indexing and crawling. Focusing solely on this, however, can get in the way of your website’s usability. Usability is all about information architecture, or structuring your website’s content and navigation in a way that makes them easier for your visitors to find and use. A careful balance between these two types of website architecture is necessary to make your website easy for search engines to read while making sure it remains useful and appealing to your visitors.

Make Your Website Responsive and Social

Your customers are often interacting with other people and posting on social networks, and many prefer to use mobile devices to access the internet. Integrating social media campaigns and adding social sharing buttons to your website has now become a standard in web design. Creating a responsive website that’s compatible with your visitors’ preferred mobile devices is also important if you want to increase your traffic and keep your brand right in front of customers on the go.

The primary rule when it comes to modern web design is to create your website for users, not search engines. While knowing about and applying the latest SEO techniques to your website is important, it is equally important to know your audience well, find out what they need, and learn what tools they use to find it.