Search engine optimization (SEO) targets your business’s organic visibility on the web. It helps you rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) and, respectively, ensures you get in front of your target audience when they’re looking for something relevant online.
Among a wealth of digital marketing tactics, SEO is one of the key ones today. Although it’s a lasting process that requires substantial commitment, it’s known to deliver tangible, long-term results in terms of online visibility, brand awareness and recognition, and more potential sales.
So, how do you make the most out of it? Generally, it’s thought to begin with stuff like keyword research, content creation, and subsequent traffic analysis with a reliable website traffic checker that can give you a sneak peek into how many people see your pages in SERPs and then click and browse your site. While all these things are pivotal for SEO, it’s actually made of more than that. Effective SEO spans not only keywords and content but also your website’s whole design and functionality.
In this article, we’ll tell you what an SEO-friendly website design is and how to create one for high positions in SERPs.
What Is SEO Web Design?
Although website design and SEO don’t seem to intersect explicitly, they can’t do without each other. As known, search engine optimization is divided into three fields:
- On-page (keyword targeting, content creation, etc.)
- Off-page (link-building, local SEO listings, etc.)
- Technical (site speed optimization, mobile friendliness, etc.)
SEO design deals with technical optimization in particular. It implies using SEO-friendly design practices that will make your site fully accessible and indexable by search engines while also ensuring that you meet the given technical requirements to sites and create positive user experiences.
Why Is It Crucial to Design SEO-Friendly Websites?
While targeting the right keywords and generating high-quality content can help you rank in SERPs, some deeper parts of your site might be hindering user experience or search engine bots’ ability to crawl and index your site and, hence, affecting your positions. These things include your website structure and navigation, loading speed, responsiveness, and many others.
All in all, by approaching the design of your site both with users and search engines in mind, you can ensure even higher rankings and more traffic and conversions in the long run.
9 Tips for Designing an Effective SEO Website
1. Focus on Mobile First
Google’s mobile-first indexing approach was introduced not so long ago and changed the entire approach to SEO and site design as well. Basically, it only means one thing – search engines rank sites according to their mobile versions rather than desktop versions. This means that businesses have to really focus on mobile devices in their SEO design.
Leverage Google’s mobile-friendly test to see how well your pages adapt to different screens and implement responsive design techniques to improve mobile friendliness.
2. Plan Your Navigation Well for UX
Today, Google ranks sites based on how well they match users’ queries, as well as how positive the user experience (UX) they deliver. Hence, UX optimization is also a big thing for high positions in SERPs, and it begins with initial web planning and creation.
In order to make your site easy to understand for search engine bots and also improve your UX, thoroughly plan your website structure and create a clear and simple hierarchy of pages. Additionally, convenient navigation features such as search, breadcrumbs, etc. should be integrated. The easier your navigation, the longer users stay on your site.
Source: Freepik
Alt text: A person working on a laptop, planning site layout
3. Make Your URL Structure Clear
In addition to the general structure and architecture of your site, the structure of your URLs also plays a role in SEO. Effective SEO web pages should have easy-to-read, simple, and clean URLs explicitly stating what users will find on a page. Hence, you should aim to simplify and shorten your URLs, avoiding complex structures or long strings of words and numbers that don’t make your URLs easy to remember.
Additionally, keep in mind that URLs play a role in the crawling and indexing process. That is, if you integrate relevant target keywords into your URLs, it can help bots understand your content better and help you get higher in SERPs.
4. Design Your SEO Web Pages to Load Fast
Page loading speed is fundamental to user experience because it’s also a direct ranking factor Google uses to define which position you can take in SERPs, and, sometimes, it might be a decisive point on whether you’ll get to the top of results or not.
To improve your loading speed for SEO and UX, focus on Core Web Vitals as primary benchmark metrics.
5. Use Header Tags Effectively
Another thing that helps create SEO-friendly websites is header tagging. Basically, header tags are HTML elements (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, and so on). They are used to add structure to the content on your pages and help search engines understand it better. Be sure to create SEO-friendly content with headers of different levels, then mark your headers with proper tags, and don’t hesitate to include relevant target keywords in them for better results.
6. Use Visual Elements Correctly
Visuals, such as images and videos, play a massive role in user engagement by making your content stand out and drive attention. They also play a significant role in SEO by making your content more structured and appealing and providing additional opportunities for optimization.
To make the most out of your visuals, use them to enrich your content and communicate your ideas more effectively. Optimize your images with SEO-friendly file names and alt texts using target keywords. And don’t forget to keep the sizes of your visuals optimal to prevent slow loading.
7. Create a Network of Internal Links
Internal links can offer you a few benefits. Namely, they help you enrich your content with additional helpful information while helping visitors navigate your pages more easily. By improving navigation and overall UX, as well as encouraging users to stay on your site for a longer time, a broad network of internal links can also help you improve your SEO and rank higher in SERPs. So don’t hesitate to use internal links on your pages.
8. Keep Focus on Accessibility and Readability
Readability is one of the primary features of SEO-friendly content, and you can create your pages in response to that. Here are a few baseline tips to make your pages readable:
- Use plenty of white space.
- Pick contrasting colors.
- Opt for fonts that are readable and comprehendible.
- Set proper font sizes to boost readability, indicate text hierarchy, and drive attention to important things.
Additionally, think about accessibility while implementing your SEO design. Integrate keyboard search features, create contrast with different colors and fonts, and use other techniques.
9. Leverage Schema Markup
Schema markup is basically a unique code that can be added to your website to help search engines understand it better, draw more information from different pages, and provide this data in rich snippets.
In order to use this to benefit your SEO website, go to schema.org or Google’s guide to create relevant markup for your pages. You can even leverage Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper if you want to save time and add markup easier.
Conclusion
SEO and site design may be two different processes, which, however, are closely linked and have to work in alignment to bring you the best results from your optimization. After reading this article, you will find a list of handy tips for making your website layout SEO-friendly. Use them to dominate SERPs and bring exceptional experiences to your visitors!
