When we think of SEO (search engine optimization), creating content is the first thought that is considered. There are a lot of articles on the internet about creating content optimized for SEO. Most of these articles forget to address how important SEO-friendly website design is.
Before search engines can crawl your content, they must navigate your site. According to digital marketing experts, SEO-friendly websites serve as a guideline to search engine crawlers, taking them through your site step-by-step and demonstrating to them what your brand can provide at every stage of interaction.
Making a website is an enormous undertaking on its own. Therefore, doing it with search engine optimization in your mind might sound difficult. However, by taking a systematic approach to SEO-friendly design for your website, it is possible to build an attractive site that is simple for search engines and users to navigate.
The Importance of an SEO-Friendly Website
The main goal of firms is to remain two steps ahead of their competitors, earning revenue and reaching their customers with the most effective method.
A search engine-friendly website is essential for both of these objectives. When search engines can recognize your site, its content is sure to rank highly on search engines. In turn, your business will see an increase in organic search traffic, making it more likely for your business to grow.
What Is SEO-Friendly Web Design?
SEO-friendly web design is a web design that is based on the needs of search engines, as well as the requirements of its users. Every web page is simple to use by search engines, understand, and index.
Should Web Design Include SEO?
Suppose you’ve been designing websites without paying attention to SEO and wondering why SEO-friendly web design is so important. It’s possible to ask what the purpose of your website is to provide services to your visitors?
While it’s crucial to consider what needs are required by your site’s visitors, there are a lot of advantages to having an SEO-friendly site that you shouldn’t overlook. When search engines are aware of the best way to use your site and are more likely to direct traffic to important pages, this could lead to:
- Organic traffic increases on your site
- A higher return on investment on your website
- The capability to increase search engine ranking and rank higher than rivals
- Increase brand recognition and increase your online presence
It’s important to remember that optimizing your site for search engines does not have to be at the expense of the user experience. Websites that are optimized for search engines often provide benefits to potential customers as well.
How to Design an SEO-Friendly Website
Creating an SEO-friendly website begins with the design and progresses to the more subtle elements of your website. A company with a huge website that needs to be overhauled will require different strategies for applying these suggestions rather than a brand new look to create a website in the beginning.
One way to get started is to study all the guidelines for making an SEO-friendly site first. Then, create a strategy to implement the suggestions using your current website and the assets you have.
Page Layout and Formatting
When you begin laying out your site, be aware of things like
- Font size
- Font color
- Background colors
While they don’t directly affect your SEO rankings, they influence the user-friendliness of your website. They affect how highly ranked your site is by search engines.
Font Size
A simple way to boost the SEO of your site is to boost the font size. A font that is 16pt or more is the ideal size for mobile users, and it is considerate of the needs of your viewers who may have difficulty reading smaller fonts.
Placement
It is also important to think about the content’s placement on every page on your site. Content that’s located “above the fold” -or prior to the point where users have to scroll their phones or in their browsers is thought to be the most important information on your website.
URLs
Last but not least, reduce your URLs as much as you can to eliminate the bulky number and letter sequences in favor of simple phrases.
The first URL informs search engines that this site is focused on layouts of pages. The second URL does not provide any details to search engines that could aid them in indexing the content within.
Site Speed
It shouldn’t be a surprise to find that engines, whose primary task is to increase customer satisfaction, are concerned greatly about site speed. Customers also do. Research has shown that a single second delay in loading times can lower satisfaction for customers by 16 per cent.
In 2021, the Google algorithm update focused specifically on the user experience of websites, making speed more important than before.
There are a variety of actions you can take to increase the speed of your website. Begin by reducing your usage of Flash or removing it altogether.
HTML5 alternatives could provide the same interactiveness on your site at just a fraction of the cost.
The next step is to optimize your website’s images. As a rule of thumb, images that consume more than 1MB can slow down your website. JPEG images typically consume smaller space as compared to PNG images, especially with larger sizes.
JavaScript can be another software that could make your site slow. If you have to utilize JavaScript on your website, check your scripts, and remove unnecessary content from the scripts.
Ads from other sites could slow down your website, particularly if you have too many. Be sure to limit the number of ads on every page in order to allow rapid loading.
In addition, the code on your site itself could slow your site’s speed. If you have excessive blank lines or spaces in your code, it can slow down your site. Get rid of your code or get someone to look through your website’s code and trim any excess.
The navigation on your site is among the most crucial aspects of SEO. A well-structured website is simple for bots to navigate. They are able to quickly move between pages, and the relationship between various pages on your website is easy for them to be able to comprehend.
Ideally, important information should be just less than two clicks away from the homepage. To improve your website’s layout and navigation, sketch the design you would like your website to appear on a small piece of paper or use digital software.
Be sure that all crucial information, such as the “About You” page, your blog’s “About You” page, your products and your blog, are able to be accessed from your site’s homepage.
When you have a clear idea of the way you want your website to appear, it’s simpler to realize your dream and design a sensible web design.
Even if you’ve got a properly-organized website, it’s an excellent idea to include an outline of your site. A site map can reassure the search engine that they are aware of your site and increases the likelihood that all pages on your site will be crawled and properly indexed.
Mobile Optimization
Google changed to mobile-first indexing at the beginning of 2019. It means Google evaluates how a website does on smartphones to be more important than the way it performs on desktops.
Mobile-first indexing is a way to ensure optimizing mobile searches essential for SEO-friendly websites and is one of the most crucial ranking factors that businesses should take into consideration.
Google’s mobile-friendly page testing tool lets you know whether your website is mobile-friendly. If non-mobile friendly, you have options to boost your mobile SEO. Certain aspects, like reducing your site’s loading times, are common SEO best methods.
Other things, like making sure you have a responsive website design, might require some extra effort. Alongside loading times and responsive designs, There are other aspects you need to take into consideration when developing mobile-friendly websites.
Text scannable: Avoid walls of text. Use regular page break breaks so that readers are able to scan your text on smaller devices.
Reducing the use of pop-ups, The pop-ups are often difficult to close on smartphones, thereby impacting the user experience. Eliminate or reduce the pop-ups you see when you are able to.
Clickable menus: Make sure that all menus on your site can be clicked, particularly on a smartphone — and also that the menus’ bottoms aren’t separated on smaller devices.
Different Types of Users
Optimizing your website’s content for search engines is also about optimizing your content to meet the needs of different types of people who might visit your website.
Text Considerations
For instance, it’s recommended to offer closed captioning for videos. Podcasts should generally be followed by a transcript written in English or a blog post that summarizes the major aspects of the podcast.
These steps will help people who can’t hear access your content, as well as provide search engines with additional information about the content that you’re creating.
Image Considerations
The same rule applies to images. Most images you use on your site — including your logo, images of products as well as images that are embedded within blog posts — should include explicit alt text. A common rule of thumb can be that if the image can give information to your visitors, it should include alt text.
You can, however, not add alt texts to images or other images that are solely decorative on your website. The main purpose of alt text is to give an understanding to visually impaired users who consume your content via assistive technology.
Alt text also gives the search engines context who are unable to comprehend your photos and may be unable to comprehend the value that your images bring to your website.
Alt text can also help drive visitors to your site. More than 20 percent of Google search traffic is generated by Google images. If you include descriptive alt text for your photos, you permit your site to rank for images-related search terms as well as regular search terms.
Keyword Research and Use
Keyword research is at the center of all SEO campaigns, and for the right reason: Keywords are among the primary ways that search engines process and index web pages.
Doing some research on keywords, as well as familiarizing yourself with different kinds of keywords, is an essential aspect of designing your website.
For instance, “where to buy” and “near me” search queries have increased by over 200% between 2017 and the year 2019. This makes geo-targeted keywords essential for businesses that want to increase local traffic.
However, knowing where and what to do with the keywords is equally crucial as getting them. The headline, also known as the title tag, is believed to be the most crucial SEO factor by 36 percent of SEO experts. It is the reason that having your main keyword in the title tag is vital to an effective SEO strategy.
Meta descriptions are a great location to include both secondary and primary keywords. Be aware the meta descriptions must be no more than 160 characters.
More than 40 percent of websites contain meta descriptions that are truncated in that the content is too long to be displayed in the Google Search result. This can alter the message and decrease the effectiveness of your keywords.
Content Creation
Effective content creation and management strategy are essential for search engine-friendly web designs. Although you may not be thinking about content creation when thinking about the design of your website, it’s crucial to think about the way that your content will appear on your website in everything from the size of the images you’ll be using to how quickly you’ll remove older content.
Content-First Design
A lot of SEO specialists are currently promoting the advantages of a content-first approach to web design. The concept is that what you intend to publish on your website should be the driving force behind your design, rather than being limited by it.
In practice, the content-first design brings web designers and content creators into the same room and requires the two to work together to design an intuitive website design that is able to meet both their requirements.
If you opt for a content-first approach or prefer an older approach to managing your content, the strategy you choose will have a direct impact on your website’s SEO. A bulk of your research will go into the creation of content. Integrating these keywords naturally while also offering value to your readers will result in a huge increase in the natural traffic to your site.
Repurposing Old Content
Keep in mind that managing content does not have to be restricted to the creation of new content. Republishing and updating old blog posts can increase the amount of traffic you get from your organic sources by 106%.
This method can be useful in the event that you have multiple blog posts that compete for the same keywords. Writing a long-form blog article that incorporates information from these multiple sources will dramatically increase the number of results from search engines. Be sure to redirect any outdated URLs to new URLs so you will continue to reap the benefits of any links that you possess.
Analytics Tools
If you’ve made the necessary steps to design a website that is SEO-friendly, The next step is to utilize analytics tools to measure the efficiency of your web design.
Analytics tools can be used to look at every aspect of the web design process, From how mobile-friendly your website is to its speed. These tools will aid you in identifying any problems in your website design and reconsider your decisions in every aspect.
You can also utilize analytics tools to review your website design over time. Comparing the analysis you have today of your website with an analysis of your site from six months ago will give an insight into what’s working and what has to be changed.
These tools are particularly important because the algorithms for search engines continue to evolve. Today’s SEO-friendly website design differed from the SEO-friendly design ten years ago. Analytics can help to keep on top of the latest developments and ensure that your website is performing effectively.
