SEO Website Design Best Practices for Boosting Your Site’s Visibility12 min read
SEO Website Design means your website should be designed with SEO principles.
Doing so will ensure high-intent organic traffic shows up unhindered on your site.
By the way, if you think being SEO-friendly is different from being user-friendly, let me tell you, it means the same these days.
Following SEO guidelines ensures that your website design is accessible, mobile-optimized, and has intuitive site navigation, among other things. These features add to the user experience, making your site darn user-friendly.
So, if you are thinking twice about whether to SEO optimize your website, be assured it’s time to double down on SEO tactics when it comes to website design, let alone think about it.
Table of Contents
- Importance of SEO Website Design
- 10 SEO Website Design Best Practices to Boost Your Site’s Online Visibility
- 1. Craft Mobile-Friendly and Mobile-First Indexed Websites
- 2. Create Intuitive Site Navigation
- 3. Strengthen the Internal Linking Profile
- 4. Improve Website speed
- 5. Proper Image file names
- 6. Descriptive Alt tags
- 7. Accuracy in Metadata Detailing
- 8. Create Indexable Content
- 9. Use HTML and CSS Code
- 10. Factor In Accessibility
- How the Pairing of Website Design and SEO Can Benefit Your Business
- Final Thoughts: Website Design and SEO
Importance of SEO Website Design
SEO stats and facts to help you understand how SEO for web design could help propel your business growth trajectory.
- 3% of website traffic stems from organic search.
- 96% of total web traffic is generated from Google Search, Google Images, and Google Maps.
- 1,000%+ SEO drives more traffic than organic social media.
- The first page of Google receives 28.5% clicks, while the 10th page gets a meager 2.5%. If your website appears on the second page of SERPs, it won’t yield much organic traffic, making SEO for web design all the more critical.
Without further ado, let’s review the 10 SEO for Web Design best practices that I have listed here. These practices could help you boost your website’s visibility like never before.
10 SEO Website Design Best Practices to Boost Your Site’s Online Visibility
Website design and SEO are not mutually exclusive. They are two sides of the same coin, meaning the web designer and SEO agencies should work together as a team and follow the best practices below to achieve the desired business goals.
1. Craft Mobile-Friendly and Mobile-First Indexed Websites
Mobile-friendliness means a website design optimized for smaller screens and touch-based devices. Simply put, the website should be responsive on all devices, irrespective of their screen sizes.
On the other hand, mobile-first indexing means that search engines index the mobile version of your website content first, while the desktop version preferably ranks second. Because of this, almost 60% of website traffic is generated on mobile.
Both mobile friendliness and mobile indexing are pivotal for providing a seamless user experience on mobile devices and improving your website’s visibility in mobile search results.
SEO Website Design, focusing on mobile-friendliness and mobile-first indexing, allows visitors a solid user experience in content readability and website usability, so much so that users can effortlessly fill out web forms regardless of whether they are using a mobile or desktop.
Let’s check out “openlibrary.org,” a mobile-indexed, mobile-friendly website that offers a free online library. The website ranks first for keywords like “free books online,” “read books online free,” “free book,” and “online library,” and boasts 360.9k in traffic.
The desktop version of ‘Open Library’ looks like this:
The Mobile version of ‘Open library’
The mobile version of the website is easy to navigate and intuitive, just like the desktop version.
To cut a long story short, your web development and design team should work hand-in-hand to ensure your website is desktop-friendly, mobile-friendly, and mobile-indexed, akin to openlibrary.org. For the uninitiated, Mobile-friendliness has been a crucial ranking factor since 2015, and in 2019, Google switched to Mobile-first Indexing.
Pro tip: As part of SEO Web Design, make sure to build your website for mobile first, and then the desktop version can follow.
Intuitive site navigation allows website visitors and search engines to find information quickly. To this end, your category and subcategory pages should be organized clearly and logically so that search engines can more effectively match your website content to customers’ search queries, boosting your website rankings.
Good website navigation benefits include increased user engagement and satisfaction, higher search engine rankings, and better conversion rates.
Additionally, website navigation is crucial in internal linking, as it directs users to the most essential website pages.
Example: “Reliance Digital” is an e-commerce website selling electronic devices in India. The site has a well-organized navigation.
Main Menu includes categories such as “Mobile & Tablets,” “Televisions,” “Audio,” “Home Appliances,” “Computers,” “Cameras,” “Kitchen Appliances,” “Personal Care,” and “Accessories.”
Each category has a dropdown menu (subcategories) leading to other product pages on the website. This strengthens the internal linking for each page, adding to the overall number of links.
For such large ecommerce sites with thousands of products, site navigation could be the be-all-and-end-all.
Besides category and subcategory pages, other navigation elements that improve user experience and are essential from an SEO website design perspective include:
Search Bar: A prominent search bar for users to quickly find specific products.
Breadcrumbs: A series of links showing the user’s current location within the website.
Site Map: A complete list of all pages on the website, which can be accessed via a link in the footer.
Page Depth: Avoid excessive page depth, as it will require many clicks to reach a specific page. This can negatively impact user experience and SEO.
Mobile-Optimized: Given the increasing importance of mobile search, ensure the navigation is easy to use on mobile devices.
3. Strengthen the Internal Linking Profile
As discussed, internal linking from category to subcategory pages undoubtedly strengthens your site’s internal linking profile. Apart from that, make sure your popular blog posts are horizontally linked to other blog posts, FAQs, and your category and subcategory pages.
Horizontal linking will help your customers and search engines find more helpful content.
Pro tip: Be mindful of your anchor text when using internal links to direct customers to other essential website pages. Instead of using generic phrases like “Click Here,” employ more specific anchor text that aligns with the “Text Intent” of the linked pages. This will resonate better with the customers and improve your website’s SEO.
4. Improve Website speed
No one likes a slow-loading website. So, it was just a matter of time before Google introduced page speed as a ranking factor in its algorithm for desktops in 2010 and for mobile in 2018.
Here are a few things that could affect your website speed here:
- Shared hosting with multiple websites on a single server
- Large images that take time to load
- Too many HTTP requests
- Redirects
- Caching issues
To check your website’s speed, consider using free tools like PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. These tools let you add your website URL and see a detailed speed score, providing you with tips for speed optimizations.
Desktop Website Speed of Reinforce Labs as shown on PageSpeed Insights
Both desktop and mobile websites will have different scores based on several metrics that you can address to improve your page speed and, consequently, your rankability.
5. Proper Image file names
If you don’t take image file names seriously enough, you must pay for them in the long run. Why? Because they help in website optimization.
So, how can you optimize your image file names? Include keywords and descriptions that could give Google a good enough idea of what the image is all about.
It is not just about proper file names; images should have appropriate alt tags, too. Why?
Alt tags are complete sentences that inform the Google algorithm about your image. This helps the search engine drive traffic to the pages where the images are located.
For example, 25% of Google search queries result in images, and almost 62% of young searchers prefer visual search capabilities over other technologies.
More importantly, screen readers are able to read the Alt tags aloud to the visually impaired helping the latter understand the content and context of the images better.
7. Accuracy in Metadata Detailing
Metadata comprises title tags and meta descriptions. In layman’s lexicon, title tags are headlines that appear in Google search results, and the brief copy just below the headline is the meta description. Title tags are extremely crucial from an SEO standpoint.
For example, here’s the Reinforce Labs search result:
The title tag and meta description contain the page’s primary keyword, improving your SEO. Ensure your title tag is a maximum of 60 characters, and the meta description can be a maximum of 160 characters.
8. Create Indexable Content
For a site to be SEO-friendly, the content should be easily crawlable, and for that, HTML text format needs to be used. For the uninitiated, HTML text format makes the content easily readable and understandable from an SEO standpoint, which gives them an edge in SERP rankings.
Apparently, developers are allergic to HTML and prefer to use JavaScript, thus knowingly or unknowingly stirring up a hornet’s nest.
Javascript doesn’t sit well with Google crawlers, as crawling and indexing information from Javascript is a time-consuming process. The worst part? The more information you add to your JS library, the more complicated it is for Google to crawl and index information.
On the other hand, developers argue in favor of JS, saying websites are developed on JavaScript frameworks like React and Angular, so using the JS text format helps developers give the website a certain look and feel.
However, as mentioned, indexing content in JavaScript is time-consuming for Google. Both web designers and SEO folks should be aware of this, as it may directly affect site speeds and Google’s crawl budget.
9. Use HTML and CSS Code
Designers have to code a little to render the design elements, and for this, they use HTML and CSS codes because they are easy to optimize, unlike sites based on Flash.
I agree. Flash sites look cool, but it’s difficult for search engines to crawl flash-based websites, so they rank low in search results.
10. Factor In Accessibility
Granted, accessibility is not a ranking factor, but it’s indirectly related to Google rankings.
Let me explain!
Accessibility is an integral part of user experience, and user experience, in turn, is a huge ranking factor. I guess that’s enough of an explanation to ensure your website sticks to Google’s accessibility guidelines.
A couple of things discussed in Google’s accessibility guidelines:
Use Image alternative text: Also known as alt tag, is added to an image, which is a brief overview of the image, making it possible for screen readers to read the text aloud to visually impaired users.
Use high-contrast colors: The rationale is to make your website design easily readable to search engines. Unlike subtle color combinations, high-contrast color combinations make differentiating text, background, and images more accessible.
Ensure font legibility: A minimum of 16px font size and left alignment is enough for crawlers to read a page.
To determine whether your page is accessible, use the Google Lighthouse browser. It’s a Chrome extension that lets you in the secret metrics of inaccessible sites.
How the Pairing of Website Design and SEO Can Benefit Your Business
A stunning website is just part of an online marketing strategy. Your website needs to be fully SEO optimized, or else the search engines will never find you, much less your customers.
Sure, paid ads and social media help, but they can only help so much. Only when you marry website design and SEO does that magic happen. In other words, when you optimize your design for SEO only, you can make it to the first page of Google.
Now, let’s review a few of the top benefits of SEO web design.
a. Drives Visibility and High-Intent Traffic
Designing your website with SEO enables you to drive organic traffic, specifically high-intent traffic. Put another way, high-intent traffic is relevant traffic.
A properly optimized website that shows up for specific keywords that your customers are searching for will drive high-intent traffic. Such traffic may not convert instantly, but it will surely do so in the long run.
Remember: Generating high-intent traffic is more important than generating any random traffic.
b. Enhances User Experience
Google ranks only websites that offer a great user experience. SEO for Web design very well addresses this criterion by optimizing for dwell time, bounce rate, and mobile usability—three features that are integral parts of UX.
c. Making Your Website Future – Ready
Optimizing your website design from day one ensures you don’t have to press the panic button for future algorithm updates. Knowing that your website design has already been optimized, the new updates may not come as a wake-up call but something that you can easily deal with.
Final Thoughts: Website Design and SEO
SEO Web Design is the yin and yang of website optimization. By following the above-given SEO web design best practices, you can be assured that your website will rank in search results, drawing in relevant traffic and conversions.
Here’s a quick recap of the main points.
- Craft Mobile-Friendly and Mobile-First Indexed Websites
- Use HTML and CSS Code
- Create Intuitive Site Navigation
- Strengthen the Internal Linking Profile
- Improve Website speed
- Proper Image file names
- Descriptive Alt tags
- Accuracy in Metadata Detailing
- Create Indexable content
- Factor In Accessibility
Ready to get started with SEO Website Design?
Make sure you have the right team at hand for this job.
Book a one-to-one call with Reinforce Labs SEO for Web Design experts.
SEO Website Design FAQs
What is SEO web design?
SEO web design is about incorporating SEO in your website design process to drive traffic and user engagement.
How SEO & Website Design affect your business?
SEO and website design have a direct effect on your business. While SEO draws traffic to your website, web design takes care of the user experience part. Together, these strategies help your websites grow and drive traffic and conversions.
Should you hire an SEO expert for your website design?
Ideally, you should hire an SEO expert for your website design; even Google’s starter guide recommends it. However, you must be constantly vigilant to ensure that the website design and SEO teams are on the same page and don’t work in different directions.
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