Web design & development tips for SEO
Many companies choose to implement search engine optimization practices after they create a website. To achieve top results, you would need to start your SEO efforts before creating a website.
Why? Because each part of your website design is an important factor, contributing to the success of your SEO campaign.
Web design and SEO go hand and hand. Each decision you make at the design stage can affect your optimization efforts.
Even if you already have a website, it’s not too late to implement an SEO-friendly web design. In this article, we’ll talk about web design tips for SEO regardless of the stage your website building is currently at.
How web design relates to SEO
If you want to get to the top spots of the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), you need to coordinate web design and SEO. These two practices relate to each other in many different ways.
How web design affects SEO: mobile-friendliness
Even if you are superficially familiar with SEO, you know that mobile-friendliness is one of the ranking factors for all search engines. The importance of making your website appear perfect on all mobile devices is hard to underestimate.
Google turned mobile-friendliness into a ranking factor back in 2015. This component is highly important for high rankings. The time when you should be implementing mobile-friendliness is at the initial stages of website design.
The lack of a mobile-friendly and responsive design could lead to a high bounce rate. After all, mobile accounts for over 50% of traffic worldwide, and the numbers keep growing.
Web design and SEO: easy-to-read
Content is one of the key pillars of all SEO efforts. Its value and readability are vital ranking factors. The easier your content is to read, the longer the visitors are likely to stay on your website, and, eventually, proceed with the CTA (call to action).
Web design plays a huge role in making your content visible and readable. It affects the way you present your articles and media.
No matter how interesting and valuable your content is, if you don’t place it on the website properly, it could be overlooked. That’s why it’s important to consider content placement, formatting, and color at the initial stages of web design.
It’s also vital to make the content available to people with disabilities. This is something that also needs to be implemented while designing your website.
Web design for SEO: website speed
The speed at which your website loads is one of the most important ranking factors. Google believes that two seconds is the threshold for website loading time. The faster your pages loads, the more chances you have at enjoying top spots on the SERPs. Ideally, you should aim for half a second loading time.
Most visitors expect the website to load under one or two seconds. If they find it loading longer, they will simply leave, bumping your bounce rate and lowering your ranking. Page loading time is especially important for mobile users. Your target audience, which visits the website on mobile, is likely to be in a rush.
Numerous ways exist to speed your website up, from altering image sizes to using asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files. However, you can give yourself an excellent start at the initial SEO stages by choosing the right hosting provider and a premium plan.
SEO and web design: sitemaps
If you want search engines to start crawling your website as soon as possible, you need a sitemap. This feature gives search engines a guide of all the pages and content you have on the website. When creating this guide, you can give search engines an idea of which pages are highly important on your website.
At the design stage, creating sitemaps can be necessary for large websites or new sites without any external links.
Additionally, sitemaps can help with user navigation, allowing visitors to stay longer.
Web design for SEO: best practices
These web design tips for SEO can improve the appearance of your website and help it reach high spots on the SERPs.
1.Make sure search engines can read your content
With content being highly important for all marketing efforts, you need to make sure it’s as visible as it is valuable. When you design your website, you should focus on creating a good content structure, including paragraphs, links, and headings.
The keys to success with content are value and volume. If your website doesn’t have sufficient content, it can have trouble achieving high rankings. With proper planning at the design stages, you can boost the quantity of your content and make it readable for search engines.
2.Turn your URLs into a search-friendly text
A proper URL design can bring more people to your website, thus increasing its popularity. It also can help the site rank higher.
Try to avoid long URLs with numbers and punctuation characters. Make sure it reflects the content of the page it leads to.
URLs containing keywords can help your website get closer to the top of search engine results.
Separate words. For example, flowershop.com/largeredroses doesn’t look as good as flowershop.com/large-red-roses.
Your content management system may generate URLs automatically. Take the time to change them into a search-friendly text.
3.Add alt tags
Your visual content can also help your website rank higher. So when you add images to your webpages, make sure to adjust the alt tags. They should describe images and contain keywords.
Search engines see alt text when crawling the website and consider it when assigning rankings. Meanwhile, such tags can help visitors with disabilities understand what the image shows.
4.Make it dynamic
Content on your website shouldn’t just be evergreen. You should be adding new information on a regular basis.
At the design stage, you can create space for excerpts from your latest blogs to appear regularly. They can switch from one to another to create a dynamic website appearance. The more often you add new content, the more often your website will be crawled.
As a bonus, showing pieces of content on other pages gives you an opportunity to use keywords twice. Just make sure you don’t repost large pieces of text or it may look like duplicating content.
5.Adjust meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are pieces of content that offer an overview of your page. When structuring your webpages, you need to make space for meta descriptions.
By using your keywords in meta descriptions, you are allowing search engines to notice your website. Meanwhile, it’s a great opportunity to show the visitor how valuable the information on the website is for them.
While it’s not necessary to have a meta description on each page, your most important webpages should come with one. Be wary, if you don’t have a meta description, Google will create one for you, and it may not be as great as you want it to be.
6.Optimize for people with disabilities
People with hearing and visual impairments as well as learning disabilities may be among your target audience. That’s why your website rankings could depend on how well they can understand the information on your website.
Make sure to use alt tags, create video transcripts, describe your links, and optimize color control. You should also avoid small buttons to cater to people with mobility issues.
7.Use W3C standards
When search engines crawl your website, they prefer seeing clean code. To achieve that, consider using W3C standards. Clean code makes it easier for the search engine to index it. Meanwhile, if you use the standard, you have to employ semantic markup, which is excellent for SEO.
Best web design tools that automate SEO
To improve the design of your website with SEO in mind, you can take advantage of SEO tools. You can take advantage of such programs as:
The majority of SEO tools can help you enhance your website design and bring it closer to the perfect format with a high ranking potential.
Web development and SEO: the takeaway
Now that you’ve learned how important the relationship between web development and SEO is, you can start adjusting your web design.
By analyzing your website structure properly, you can get insights into what can be changed to help SEO. The faster you start changing the design to suit optimization efforts, the better results you can enjoy with the rankings.
Web design and SEO go hand in hand. By keeping one in mind when developing the other, you can create a high-quality website optimization strategy.