Websites Designed while keeping the user needs into consideration are good. But this alone doesn’t determine their rank on SERPs. Designing websites should also include SEO practices to make an SEO-optimized website. Considering Users’ needs and SERP rankings both help websites rank higher on SERPs. This makes an SEO-Friendly Website. Designing SEO-Friendly websites is one of the most important tasks to keep in mind while planning.
In this article, we will discuss What is SEO-Friendly Web Design? Why is important? What are the Best Practices to keep in mind while making an SEO-Friendly Web Design? What to avoid when making an SEO-Friendly Web Design? and some benefits of making an SEO-Friendly Web Design.
SEO-Friendly Web Design
SEO-Friendly Web Design
SEO web design is the practice of creating websites that are not only user-friendly but also easily understood and indexed by search engines like Google. A well-optimized website allows search engines to efficiently crawl and comprehend its content, thus including it in their database. This ensures that when people search for specific topics, the most relevant and valuable web pages can be displayed. Effective SEO strategies, in collaboration with web design, increase the likelihood of being indexed and appearing on the coveted first page of search results. The primary aim of SEO website design is not only to attract visitors but also to secure a high ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs), facilitating the discovery of the website by users seeking relevant information or products and consequently driving organic traffic and potential customers to the site.
Importance of SEO-Friendly Web Design
There are many websites that are designed or redesigned without any consideration of their rankings on SERPs. These websites perform badly when they’re made available to the public. SEO should be an early priority even before the development starts. Not optimizing the website for SERPs will affect the online image of the owner of the website. Considering about SEO during the planning phase will help the website to be ranked higher on the SERPs. SEO-friendly website will directly influence users about their impression on the website and how they will interact with the website.
Best Practices
- Indexability: Making webpages Search Engine Friendly by using “alt” texts that will help Search Engines to identify visual elements like an Image.
- Responsiveness: Making the website responsive will help the users who are using a different platform view the website with ease.
- Simplifying the Website structure: Structure of a website is how the website is linked together and how a user will navigate page from page. Designing a simple structure for a website will help increase the user engagement.
- Limit the number of Pages: Using a limited number of pages will help Search Engines to read up more pages and will cause less potential issues.
- Optimizing the User Experience: User Experience is one of the most important factors to consider while designing a website. Optimizing the website regarding user’s needs will help the website to rank higher on SERPs.
Benefits of SEO-Friendly Web Design
- Increases Brand Awareness: Websites ranking higher on SERPs will increase the Brand’s reputation online. And it will give Brands a unique identity.
- Cross Platform Users: Having a responsive website will bring traffic from users operating on different platforms.
- Organic Search Traffic: SEO-Friendly websites gets organic search traffic on the website which is easier to turn from users to potential clients.
- Gives Competitive Advantage: Brands having SEO-friendly websites gets an advantage over their competitions who has similar services.
- Helps Build Trust with Clients: Website ranking higher on SERPs and having a unique and strong Brand identity gives clients a sense of security and increases their trusts towards the Brand.
- Gives a Boost to Marketing Strategies: Brands hosting events and running campaign gets more viewers and get more traffic across platforms which helps gain more potential clients.
Technical SEO Points to Remember
- Crawlability: Make sure that all of your website’s pertinent pages are accessible to and readable by search engine crawlers.
- Robots.txt: Set up the robots.txt file correctly to tell search engines which sites to index and which ones to ignore.
- XML Sitemap: Create and publish an XML sitemap to search engines so they can more quickly find and index the pages on your website.
- URL structure: Make use of clear, concise URLs that appropriately reflect each page’s content and contain pertinent keywords.
- Canonicalization: To lessen the possibility of duplicate content problems, use canonical tags to identify the preferable version of identical or duplicate material.
- Page Speed Optimization: Make sure your website loads quickly, as this is a major search engine ranking element.
- Mobile Responsiveness: As mobile usability becomes more crucial for SEO, make sure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly.
- HTTPS Security: Use HTTPS encryption to safeguard user information on your website and raise its search engine ranking.
- Structured Data Markup: To provide search engines more context about your material, use structured data markup (like Schema.org).
- Image Optimization: To enhance user experience and search engine visibility, optimize photos using alt text, informative filenames, and appropriate compression methods.
- 404 Error Handling: If a user comes across a broken link, customize the 404 error page to direct them to pertinent content and offer useful information.
- Internal Linking: To aid search engines in comprehending the hierarchy and connections among the pages on your website, establish a coherent internal linking structure.
- Mobile Usability: To boost search rankings and the mobile user experience, test and optimize your website for mobile devices.
- Schema Markup: To improve the way your listings show in search results, use schema markup to give search engines structured data about your material.
- Optimized Metadata: To increase click-through rates and search engine exposure, create captivating and keyword-rich header tags, meta descriptions, and title tags for each page.
Things to Avoid
- Unoptimized Website Navigation: Website should not be designed to have a poor navigation or it can ruin Users Experience.
- Not making a Responsive Design: Making a website that is not Responsive can loose potential customers who operate from different platform.
- Duplicate Content: Using same content on webpages can become one of the major problems as Search Engines don’t rank pages with duplicate content.
- Overuse of Keywords: Spamming Keywords over and over on the website will affect the ranking of the website on SERPs. It is known as Keyword Stuffing.
FAQs
1. What is a SEO-Friendly Web Design?
SEO-Friendly Web Design is an approach to design a website with that can be easily understood and ranked by Search Engines.
2. Why SEO-Friendly Web Design is important?
It is important as it helps website to get ranked higher on the SERPs and makes users aware about the Brand.
3. How does SEO optimized design benefits a Brand?
It helps the Brand gain more organic traffic and increase their clients while also giving them a unique identity online.
4. Why SEO-Friendly Web Design should be Responsive?
Websites being Responsive will help them to gain cross platform users which will increase traffic on their website.