SEO Website Design: Important Facts to Know

SEO Website Design: Important Facts to Know

SEO is essential for business websites that are present online. Many people do not consider search engine optimisation an integral part of website design. However, you will see the effects of SEO on website design at a later stage. 

This means that website design is vital to take care of SEO. Moreover, you need to run the website smoothly on various digital channels. It would be best if you also got traffic-related organic searches.

SEO is also an essential factor for website redesigning. An excellent digital marketing front requires good SEO. Businesses fail to consider that website design has an impact on SEO. 

Usually, we do not consider hiring the right E-commerce website designing services for our existing website. However, you must also use the right SEO resources to avoid wasting time and money.

Consider several considerations when building your site for lead generation and search marketing. It is necessary to focus on several aspects of making your users happy so that Google stays by your side.

It would help if you took care of the pitfalls your business will likely encounter as you build a new website focused on making exemplary digital marketing efforts. Also, you need the right help to ensure your site gets used as a digital marketing machine.

SEO website design is essential for the website’s online success. In other words, improving SEO is needed to improve online success. SEO search also helps you plan well for paid search, social, and other inbound marketing efforts. 

When you use collective digital marketing efforts, things won’t happen correctly, and you can’t attain your digital marketing goals.

How To Develop an SEO Website Design?

An SEO website design helps search engines take care of various ways to find and crawl pages on a site. A search engine’s ability to crawl and learn about your content is vital to ensure your page is visible to a search engine.

The search engine’s web crawler carries out this task. It would be best to work with the search engines rather than against them. Additionally, consider the various ways to reach your target audience through your website. Also, using several tools and techniques to improve search engine optimisation would be best.

You need an SEO website design to care for the business and services you want to render. If the site is complicated, it is not easy to document things for your various projects unless you plan and organise them well.

It would help if you also had a top-class digital marketing plan, including SEO with a transparent business model alongside its value proposition. If it is unclear, you need to reframe the proposition. 

Also, you need to have the right stuff in place; you need to take care of Core Elements and set the stage for a well-optimised website design process. Here are those elements with a brief description of how they impact SEO.

1 – Domains

Your business requires using domains; domain.com is your primary domain. You may also go for other kinds of domains. You must ensure that your domain makes complete sense for your business goals. 

Ensure that you take care of the variations and subdomains pointing to your leading site and redirecting to a single canonical version of your site.

You do not require going for keywords in your domain name that look like -‘site-in-my-domain.com’. This makes the site look just like a draft. 

It also proves helpful for local businesses to take care of things such as keyword mapping for your website and implement it in multiple aspects to make it a user-friendly search engine. 

2 – Hosting

Hosting a website plays an important role. A slow site cannot give you happy users. Moreover, it would be best to care for hosting with common sense. You need to be at the place where your audience is. It would be best if you were platform-specific as per your customer preferences. 

Think about which platform can help you with all the features your customers want to see on your website. In this, WP Engine is an essential example of offering a highly customised platform for your WordPress websites.

3 – CMS

A CMS (content management system) you choose for your business website hugely influences your success. WordPress is the right option for several situations. But you can use many other CMSs. 

WordPress is the most suitable for Google at the primary level. You need to understand your starting point to check how to make the most of your situation. Choose the suitable CMS matching your requirements in place of a system your web company prefers to work with.

Crawling & Accessibility of your Website

Ensure that the search engine can crawl your site. This means that you understand how they do things and how they find them.

4 – Indexation

You must also understand that your search engine can read your page’s content. Your site’s text-based content plays a vital role behind the scenes. Indexation is not related to images, flash, and video. The main content needs to be text-based. 

You need to have the images in place and use clear language connected to how the search engine reads and understands them.

Doubtlessly, images, videos, and PDFs are valuable sources of a lot of search engine traffic. But this kind of content needs to be discoverable and indexable. You can do this by writing relevant alt text for such content.

5 – Link Structure

Make sure that all your content beyond the homepage gets indexed. Go for internal links that search engines can crawl (you must choose the correct anchor text). Also, take care of search engine directives for primary navigation. 

Tools like XML sitemaps help the search engine crawl your site and discover new pages. Check the content in tools like Screaming Frog to ensure that your site gets easily crawled by the search engine.

6 – Information Architecture And Site Structuring

Go for a particular site structure that you may prefer. For example, if you choose the ‘filing cabinet analogy’ for website structure, significant categories in your website include drawers. Moreover, your subcategories include folders in the drawers. 

Also, you may have pages stacked as documents in the folders. Here is this website analogy:

• Cabinet: your website
• Drawer: high-level category
• Folder: subcategory
• File: individual document/page

You will understand the context of using a site existing only at a single position in a site. It means that, overall, your site revolves around this context.

Here is a structure of the SEO website design you can see:

Home

– Services

– – Service Area

– – – Individual Service

Home

– Services

– – SEO

– – – SEO Audits

When you check your page structure, you may have a service simply for /audits/. Websites are present in the folder in a services drawer; they need to be organised well in SEO. 

Understanding the various SEO elements helps you relate to the context beyond what is indicated in its home page document. 

This is relevant to blog posts, articles, FAQ content, services, locations, and anything else on a business website. When you have to structure the information related to your business, you must ensure that you can comprehend it well.

There are a few sites following an in-depth approach to content structuring. Also, you may go for a broader strategy. It would help if you organised things to make sense or simplified the navigation and facilitated an easier discovery of target content.

Use a three-to-four-level approach to ensure that your content allows easy navigation through just three or four clicks for more in-depth content. It is easier for search engines and users to find content this way.

7 – URLs

It would help if you had a contextual URL with a sensible name so that humans and search engines could quickly get it.

Here are two hypothetical sets of URLs for an SEO website design. See how they plan to map the Services > SEO > SEO Audit path.

Now, consider two examples of URL mapping:

I

www.example.com

www.example.com/services/

www.example.com/services/seo/

www.example.com/services/seo/audits/

II

www.example.com

www.example.com/s123/

www.example.com/s123/s1/

www.example.com/s123/s1/75/

The first URL is related to a naming convention, and it helps both search engines and users. And the second one is responsible for a hindering experience.

8 – Navigation

You need to take care of navigation. If a site is well-structured, you will have navigation that works well for the structure, page URLs, and other components, such as XML sitemap. This means good navigation will help to solidify each page or piece of content.

Navigation goes beyond the menu at the top of a website. It serves the same purpose as the signpost for the most relevant parts of a website. 

Navigation can also improve awareness about your additional services. It includes text links and content on all various pages in the design elements of a site’s template.

A signpost analogy is essential as you enter a supermarket and look for signs to reach your destination. Your website is no different. 

As a user refers to your website and searches for a brand name, you need a landing on a home page. It would be best to have a signpost to reach out to the relevant services vital for a website.

It would be best if you thought deeply while building your site. This is related to the needs and wants of the users. 

Your website must combine the digital components, allowing you to plan your strategy. Users must understand why the website meets their needs.

Navigation should be easy. Users do not require thinking about how to find what they need to do on your website. Consider this. 

When users cannot find what they are looking for on a website, they will return to the original page with the list of competitors on Google. Your website’s navigation needs to be transparent. 

Carry out A/B testing to determine if a user can make a mistake in reaching where they want to on your website. 

Ensure that important content is easily discoverable and straightforward enough to understand the site’s overall structure to make sense.

9 – Mobile-friendly Design

A mobile phone is a popular device for internet searches and browsing websites. Customers consider mobile the way to go for the content, products, and services they seek. 

You need to optimise content for your website, giving adequate consideration to the website’s mobile layouts (in place of going for a responsive website design).

Today, you need a mobile-friendly design to maximise the outcomes of mobile searches. It means you need to consider mobile users' behaviours and requirements. A user will do entirely different things on the phone than on a computer. 

Though your conversions primarily come from the desktop, you must pay attention to the crucial first touch on the mobile.

It would be best to hire a website design company and consider essential factors to create a mobile SEO website design that helps you go beyond simple, responsive, mobile-friendly design.

Also, mobile-friendliness is a valuable ranking factor for mobile search, and you need to optimise your website’s mobile version through the search engine. This will also help you review and rank your site. The mobile lets you see how prospective customers search and browse your site.

10 – Usability

Website usability is related to the combination of various factors, such as: 

• A device-specific design.
• Page speed.
• Design conventions.
• Intuitive approach. 

Putting the site together keeps the end-user in mind.

There are certain factors you need to consider:

• Page layout. This is an element with great value.
• Visual hierarchy. It helps to improve the importance of crucial elements!
• Home page and site navigation. The home page is like using the right signpost directions.
• Site search. Big sites must be positioned appropriately through better SEO visibility.
• Form entry. Keep the forms lightweight and easy to fill.
• Design. Get a top-class website design to make things easier.
• Also, optimise your SEO website design by taking care of mobile optimisation.

11 – Content Marketing Funnel Considerations

You need to take care of your website’s on-site and off-site content so prospective customers can reach out to you through search engines. Engage and convert the customers.

Top-of-the-funnel Awareness

Awareness content helps to take your blog towards informational articles. This allows you to understand the problems customers are facing. This enables you to solve customer experience problems, enhancing a website’s credibility to solve them. 

Here are things you can do to improve your website’s top-of-funnel awareness. For this, move forward to write:

• Blog posts.
• Webinars.
• Informational articles.
• Comprehensive guides.
• FAQs.

Middle of the funnel awareness

The content at the middle of the funnel consideration stage should encourage prospects to go for your offerings. These considerations are efficient and help the customers to make the right decision. These include:

• Case studies.
• Product or service information.
• Product demonstration videos.
• User guides.

Bottom of the Funnel Conversions

Bottom-of-the-funnel content is related to driving conversions. It also nudges the customers to go for a lead or a sale. This kind of content includes:

• Reviews.
• Testimonials.
• Free trial.
• Free consultation.

Customers also search across an extensive spectrum of content types. Therefore, you must cover all these areas to discover your content with search engines. Also, it would be best if you made important considerations for conversions, including:

• HTML title tags.
• Meta description tags.
• Also, meta descriptions require you to consider the following:
• Heading tags.
• Page content.

A page’s text content is a crucial part of the page. It must offer value to the customers. However, outdated SEO practices involve overtly using keywords and search terms thrust into a copy. It doesn’t work well for SEO website design. Instead, it is not good, leading to a poor user experience.

12 – Rich snippets

Schema.org lets you start with the ranking of snippets, and you need to take care of several factors, such as:

Image optimisation

Image optimisation is related to lowering the file size to the maximum extent while retaining its quality. This includes taking care of assets like pictures, graphics, icons, and video, which must be as lean as possible. It is done in various ways, such as:

• Image Cropping – You can crop parts of the image you do not require in the final image.
• Image Resizing – Proportionally shrink the image size.
• Image Compression – Use plugins to lower the file size 

URL Optimisation

The URL needs to tell about your business spontaneously, emphasising more on the brand more. It should be SSL-secured.

If a business has two domains, for example:

• Example.com
• Example.co.uk

You need to take care of issues using URL redirections. Such issues require the involvement of a web design agency in its hosting. Agencies must also be aware of the SEO of their customers’ websites.

12 – Botched Canonical URLs

If the site (considered in the example) is also running on HTTP and HTTPS, then the URL versions include the following:

www.fancytshirts.com

https://m.fancytshirts.com

There can be further variations, such as:

https://amp.fancytshirts.com
https://fancytshirts.com?ref=twitter

All these URLs point to the same home page. Incorrect implementation of canonical URLs is, again, an important issue. Typically, suppose you have a designer building the site to cover canonical URLs in their SEO website design checklist. 

You must enter the URLs dynamically if you insert the URL in the address bar and the canonical URL. You can get a site running on multiple URLs, with each canonical URL seeming authoritative. 

So, the canonical implementation can sometimes enhance rather than resolve the issues. It is imperative to seek expert advice to get things sorted for canonical problems.

Following such best E-commerce practices, the website designing services can help you resolve your canonical URL issue. Add a URL and a canonical tag to each page on your website. Sites that republish your content also need to add canonical tags pointing to the URL. Ensure that you check your URLs and your canonical tags. 

Other Common Issues

There are various crucial content-related issues that, if found by the search engine or user, will work against you. These include:

• Orphaned content or content which Google cannot find.
• Content that is only available with a thorough site search.
• Flash files, Java programs, audio files, and video files.
• AJAX* and flash site effects.
• Frames or content embedded from another site can be problematic.
• Subdomains also have content split into subdomains in place of sub-folders

* Google has become much better for reading AJAX pages, but you must hide the content with pointless effects.

Conclusion

Website design and SEO share a complex interconnection. These are some of the best practices for you to follow to enhance your site while taking care of your SEO website design. This can make things more straightforward for you. 

But, if you have questions about combining these factors to start a website design or redesign project, you require expert help. 

Reach out to Passionate Marketing, a team of talented designers, developers, and SEOs, to get functional and visually appealing sites that attract customers and get you conversions and sales.