Perhaps you know everything there is to know about SEO content. But what do you know about SEO web design? SEO friendly web design is all about making a website that search engines will like, which makes your content more likely to be seen. Many SEO experts spend more time on their content than their web design. If your SEO and web design teams have never met, it’s time to introduce them, so they can work together to create the best possible optimized website. Let’s discuss how to design an SEO friendly website.
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What is SEO Web Design?
SEO web design is a term that describes the process of designing websites with the intention of making them search-engine friendly. This means making sure search engines can effectively crawl each web page on your site, understand its content, and index it in their database. Once your web pages are indexed on Google and other search engines, they are more likely to be seen in search results. This means hopefully an end result of a website that ranks well in the search engine results pages.
How do SEO and Web Design Work Together?
Are you wondering, “how do SEO and web design relate to one another?” Web design can integrate aspects of SEO to help build a well-optimized website that search engines will love. Here are five ways that search engine optimization and web design work together to create a perfectly optimized website:
Mobile-Friendliness
It’s important to have a mobile-friendly website not just for customer satisfaction reasons, but also for SEO reasons. Google uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. So if you want to show up high on the search engine results page, it’s a must that your site be mobile-friendly. And if you’re not already convinced, then you should know that mobile browsing accounts for more than half of web traffic.
Easy to Read (and Crawl) Design
So, you have spent lots of times working on your website’s content. Great! But how easy is it to read? Did you choose a font that your readers won’t have to squint to make out? Is it all text with no images? Are there way too many (or not enough) links? Did you choose pleasing and contrasting colors? Yes, your content itself is important. But it’s also important that your website is aesthetically pleasing and easy for your visitors to read and understand. Not to mention, it also needs to be easy for search engines to crawl, too.
Loading Speed
Another critical factor of SEO web design is your website’s loading speed. If your website is slow, it will contribute to a higher bounce rate, which in turn makes search engines dislike your site. Additionally, if your website is slow to load, it will also take a long time for Google to crawl your site. This means Google will crawl fewer pages of your site, which means fewer of your pages will be indexed. Pages that aren’t indexed are less likely to be found by searchers. Overall, slow site speed is extremely detrimental for your SEO, not to mention your website’s user experience.
But what exactly is an acceptable loading speed for a website? According to most experts, if your site takes longer than three seconds to load, it’s too long. There are several ways you can speed up your website. For example, you can compress your images, eliminate unnecessary plugins, allow browser caching, and more.
Make a Sitemap
If you want Google to crawl your websites, a sitemap can help. An XML sitemap provides search engines with a list of the pages of your website. It tells search engines everything they need to know in order to crawl your site effectively. A Not to mention, a sitemap also helps your website visitors find what they are looking for, too. A sitemap is integral for a website with good SEO.
Appear Trustworthy and Legitimate
This factor is harder to measure than some of the other factors that link SEO and web design, but it is no less important. These days, we all inherently trust a website that looks professional and performs well. The opposite is true for a website that is neither of those things. That is why it is important to have a well-designed website. If a user finds your website but is turned off and leaves, that will affect your bounce rate. Plus, it is unlikely that that person will ever return to your site.
How to Create an SEO Friendly Site
So, you’ve done all your keyword research and created content full of targeted keywords. Next, here are some tips to ensure that you follow the best practices of web design for SEO:
Simplify Your URLs
Make sure to make your URLs as user-friendly as possible. You can customize the web page’s URL as you create. The key is to keep it simple and make sure it contains relevant keywords for the page, so search engines know what the page is about. Also, make sure to create a unique URL for each web page!
Avoid Duplicate Content
It’s important to avoid duplicate content – both duplicate content that you already have on your site, or that already appears elsewhere on the internet. Search engines hate duplicate content. Duplicate content will not only not help your search ranking, but can actually hurt it. That’s right: search engines penalize websites when they find duplicate content.
Utilize Internal Linking
If you aren’t already working on link building, it’s a good idea to utilize internal linking on your website. If you write a blog post that mentions the topic that you wrote another blog post on a few weeks earlier, link to it! Internal linking helps build page authority. Not to mention, internal links also help readers navigate to another page on your site, which keeps them on your site longer!
Optimize Your Images
Every SEO expert knows that you need to optimize your text. But are you optimizing your images, too? You can add alt text to your original images on your website with relevant keywords to help improve your SEO.
Check for Orphan Pages
When search engines crawl a website, they jump from one web page to another web page. That is why it is imperative that you make sure there aren’t any orphan pages on your website. You can do so by making sure all your pages are attached to your website structure.
Make it Mobile-Friendly
As mentioned earlier, it is necessary these days that every website is compatible for all devices and screens, but particularly for mobile devices. If you want your website to have a high search ranking, make sure to make it mobile-friendly.
No-Index Any Necessary Pages
If there are any pages of your website that you would prefer search engines not crawl and index, for whatever reason, you can no-index those pages. You can do so by using a robots.txt. This will tell the search engines’ bots the pages you don’t want crawled.
If you utilize all these tips, you are well on your way to designing an SEO friendly website.
Design an SEO Friendly Website with SEO Design Chicago
If you need help designing an SEO-friendly website for your business, the expert web designers at SEO Design Chicago are available to help you with designing and developing your site. We can assist you every step of the way, from web design, creating content for your site, and other SEO strategies. Contact us today!
FAQs about SEO Web Design:
- Is SEO part of web design?
- What is the definition of SEO web design?
- What SEO considerations should I take when building a website?
- What are some ways SEO and web design go together?
- How do I make my website Google friendly?
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