SEO web design is a way of designing and developing websites to make them search-engine-friendly. It can also be described as the action of creating websites that are fully accessible and indexable by search engines.
Making a website SEO friendly means that search engines such as Google can crawl each page on the website in an efficient manner, interpret the content effectively, and index it in their database. Once indexed, they can then serve to show the most relevant and valuable web pages to their users based on the searchers intent.
The better the SEO strategies and the more an SEO team is integrated into the web design process, the better the chance of ranking on the first page of the search results.
What is an SEO friendly web design?
An SEO friendly web design is one that is easy for search engines to crawl and understand the structure and its content.
The most important characteristics of an SEO friendly web design are:
- Unique titles and descriptions for all pages.
- Fast loading web pages.
- Well formatted URLs.
- No duplicate content.
- Pages have a meaningful structure.
- Includes images that are optimized for search engines.
Why is SEO friendly web design important?
SEO is as important to creating a website as the design itself. If the website is designed keeping SEO in mind, then the page will start ranking from the time of its existence and will attract visitors from search engines.
If SEO were incorporated from the web design stage, then you would be spending less time and money in undoing what is already done and adding newer search engine friendly things to get your page ranking.
SEO-friendly websites usually get more traffic than websites that ignore search engines. Of course, you want to put your users and their demands first. But to get the most out of your website, you want to design and develop your website by keeping both your users as well as search engines in mind.
Here Are 8 SEO Tips That Will Help Improve Your Web Design:
1. SEO-Friendly On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization includes web SEO strategies that are controlled by the website owner. These strategies play a crucial role in how the search engines crawl and understand your content.
Here are some On-page optimization strategies that you can start today:
- Undertake a keyword research by selecting the right keywords and topics, and using them in appropriate places on the page
- Create a URL structure that is optimized for both users and search engines.
- Ensure that you have your title tags, header tags, image alt tags, and the meta description tags in place.
- Create an internal linking structure, along with a navigation, and an information structure that helps the search engines crawl the website effectively as well as efficiently and also aligns with your user’s expectations
- Focus on creating consistent and high-quality content for users, which can be further used to earn inbound links during off-page optimization strategies
- While creating a responsive website design, ensure that it also provides a great user experience across all devices.
- When designing your website ensure that it is visually appealing, represents your brand, and has a consistent look and feel
2. Make Sure Your Site Navigation Is Search Engine Friendly
Website navigation (a.k.a., internal link architecture) are the links within your website that connect your pages. The primary purpose of website navigation is to help users easily find stuff on your site. Search engines use your website navigation to discover and index new pages.
Links help search engines to understand the content and context of the destination page, as well as the relationships between pages.
Search engines have a really tough time crawling a website that uses Flash. Try opting for CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript as they can provide almost any of the fancy effects you are looking for without sacrificing your search engine rankings.
3. Make It User-Friendly
Google focuses on providing its users with quality and relevant content. So, whenever somebody clicks on a search result and ends up on your website, Google wants to see your users happy. A website visitor is always happy when he discovers an appealing website that directly offers them something useful. It could be information, a picture, an infographic, a video, a promise, or anything that would captivate them.
The navigation and load of the website should be easy, both on mobile and desktop. The menu should contain the most relevant categories, and the header should give users everything they need in order to take their desired action.
If the website is user-friendly, people will spend more time on it, and they’ll also share your work on social media. If the website is not user-friendly, people will leave and your “bounce rate” will grow.
4. SEO-Friendly Off-Page Optimization
Off-page optimization refers to overseeing the execution of the marketing and promotion of a website. This entails earning backlinks and social media mentions that help increase the authority of your website, resulting in an increase in the SEO rankings as well as traffic.
Off-Page Techniques Include:
- Analyzing your competition to better understand what strategies they are using to rank in the search results.
- Using keyword-rich anchor text in your inbound links.
- Earning inbound links from websites that are considered authoritative by the search engines.
- Earning links to content deep within your website.
5. Use Content That Search Engine Spiders Can Read
Content is the life force of a website, and it is what the search engines feed on. When designing a website, makes sure you take into account good structure for content from headings, to paragraphs, and links.
Sites that have very little content tend to struggle in ranking in search results and, in most cases, this can be avoided if there is proper planning in the designing stages.
6. Use Unique Meta Data
Page titles, descriptions, and keywords should all be different. Web designers make the mistake of creating a template for a website and forgetting to change out the metadata, and what ends up happening is that several pages will use the original placeholder information.
Every page should have its own set of metadata; as that helps search engines get a better grasp of how the structure of the website is constructed.
7. Use Heading Tags Properly
Make good use of heading tags in your web page content as they provide search engines with information on the structure of the HTML document, and they often place a higher value on these tags relative to other text on the web page except for hyperlinks.
Use the h1 tag for the main topic of the page. Make good use of h2 through h6 tags to indicate the content hierarchy and to outline blocks of similar content.
Avoid using several H1 tags on a single page.
8. Block Pages You Don’t Want Search Engines Index
There could be pages on your site that you don’t want search engines to index. These pages could be pages that add no value to your content, such as server-side scripts. These web pages could even be pages you are using to test your designs as you are building the new website which is not recommended but a lot of webmasters still do.
Don’t expose these web pages to web robots as you could run into duplicate content issues with search engines that lose your real content’s density, and these things could have a negative effect on your website’s search rankings.
The best way to prevent certain web pages from being indexed by search engine spiders is to use a robots.txt file
Conclusion
When SEO is done correctly and built into the web design process, SEO services will add value to the website’s experience by making the website search-engine-friendly and providing a better user experience, as well as greatly helping the business achieve its marketing goals.
