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How to Design an SEO Friendly Website?

by Abdul Rimaaz Abdul Rimaaz Business Consultants UK

SEO web design is a process of building websites that search engines can crawl, index and understand. Search engine crawlers cannot "read" and "interact" with a website like a human being. For this reason they access the HTML code of the site and look for signals that help them understand the structure of the site and the meaning of its content.

Why is SEO Important for Web Design?

Following SEO Friendly design practices for websites is important to obtain a result that meets both the needs of users and search engines. If search engines can't figure out what topics a site is about, it can have a negative impact on traffic and rankings.

Web Design Principles That Are Also SEO Friendly

Now let's see how to design websites that can combine both the needs of users and search engines.

These are the 6 principles to follow:

1. Accessibility

2. Site structure

3. URL structure

4. Link structure

5. On-page SEO optimization

6. User experience

Note: SEO applied to web design is not about the graphic aspect of the website or the colors you use. These are subjective elements and not something important to Google. What is important is how a website is structured and whether it sends the right signals to satisfy the various search engine ranking factors.

Accessibility

An SEO friendly website is indexed by search engines without any problems. This is the first principle of SEO Friendly Web Design, and it is very important.

To ensure that the website and its content are indexed correctly, you need to keep these steps in mind:

Optimize Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a file in the website's root directory that instructs search engines on which pages of the website it can index. Any fake block in the robot file can be disastrous, so the first thing to do is check and optimize the robots.txt file.

Check for scan errors

The next step is to check for scan errors. Google has a webmaster tool known as Search Console, which among other things can give you information on crawl errors. How to do?

Step 1: Add website verification with Google Search Console.

Step 2: Find and fix any scan errors.

Submit the XML Sitemap

An XML Sitemap lists all the important pages on a website that search engines need to be aware of.

It is normal for a website to have many pages, but not all of them are useful to search engines.

To make his job easier, you can create and submit an XML Sitemap via the Google Search Console.

Sitemaps are not only used for discovery purposes, but also as a great way to inform search engines about updates in the site's structure or content.

Canonical URLs

A canonical URL tells search engine crawlers which version of a page they need to index.

For example, if you have different pages for desktop and mobile with the same content, you need to tell Google that these pages are the same. If you don't, Google only indexes one of the versions or gets confused, which can negatively affect your site's ranking.

Tips:

Set a preferred domain: Google Search Console helps you specify how you want Google to treat your pages.

The example below illustrates how for Google the links point to two different websites (despite being the same domain):

https://www.abdulrimaaz.com/

http://www.abdulrimaaz.com/

Specify a canonical URL for all pages.

Each website page must specify a canonical URL in the header.

If you are using WordPress you can install the Yoast SEO plugin and it will do it automatically, or you can ask a developer to make the necessary changes in the CMS.

ALT text for the image which the

Making images accessible to search engines is another important principle. Images make the page more interesting and easier to read, but search engine crawlers are unable to "understand" an image.

To make crawlers work easier and increase the chances of getting more search traffic, you need to optimize images. The most important SEO factor for images is ALT text.

Website structure

Having a simple and well-organized site structure is vital. Search engines first work by crawling the home page of a website, then proceed with all the links that start from the home and only then index the other pages.

Each page of the website should be accessible from the home page in three clicks or less. So it is always better to organize the website in a hierarchical way, which in any case does not exceed more than 2 or 3 levels.

It is recommended to have a breadcrumb menu that allows users to return to the previous level and finally to the home page.

URL structure

An optimized URL structure must match and support the website structure. The URL structure is the format of the permalinks (also known as a slug).

An SEO friendly URL structure must have the following characteristics:

Short and informative URLs, for example: https://www.abdulrimaaz.com/inbound-marketing/

Include SEO keywords in the URL (see the URL of this post as an example)

Do not include dates in the URL

Directly indicate the page, for example - https://www.abdulrimaaz.com/how-to-develop-a-growth-plan-for-your-business-2021/

Internal link structure

The pages of a website should be linked together to create a small network.

There are several reasons why this makes a website more SEO Friendly:

Helps crawling and indexing

Increase the relevance of the topic

It helps to drive traffic to the most important pages of the website

It's a great way to bolster your SEO strategy

On Page SEO Optimization

Any page published on the website should be optimized for search engines.

This includes:

· Home page

· Category pages

· Single pages or posts

· Landing page

The general principles of On-page SEO that you should always follow are:

Pay attention to the page titles

Optimizing page titles is perhaps the most important SEO factor. A well-optimized title helps both search engines and users understand what the page is about and this translates into more clicks and better rankings.

Work on the titles

A good visual design divides a page into several “virtual” sections. This is especially useful for long pages with a lot of information (be it text, images or video). Each section should have its own optimized header. This makes the page easier to read for both search crawlers and users.

Technically this means that a page should have one H1 tag (for the main title), several H2 tags for the header sections and H3 tags for the subsections.

User experience

Last but not least, when it comes to SEO and web design, particular attention must be paid to the user experience. A winning design is not about colors and fonts, but puts the focus on improving the overall user experience.

What are the most important factors to keep in mind:

Website speed

Both Google and users want websites to load quickly. What do we mean by fast websites? A website that loads content in less than 3 seconds to mobile devices using a 3G connection.

If you've tried to improve your website loading speed, you know it's very difficult to get to less than 3 seconds. However, you should aim to make the website as fast as possible.

You can use the PageSpeed Insights report (a tool provided by Google to help webmasters speed up their website) as a starting point.

Mobile friendly

Did you know that 60% of Google searches are done on mobile devices? You should follow a mobile-first approach when designing your website. Instead of designing the website for desktop and then optimizing it for mobile devices, you should do it in reverse, as this will definitely improve your users' experience.

If you already have a website, make sure the website passes the mobile optimization test. You can then use a tool such as Optimizely or Hotjar or other similar software to monitor how users interact with the mobile site and make any necessary improvements. These tools can produce a heatmap or even record video user sessions so that you can see how users interact with the website.

Website security

Website security is not a design factor, but it is a factor that affects the user experience a lot. The website must be secure (https) and protect user information in the best possible way.

Where applicable, you should also demonstrate to users that the website is protected by displaying logos or other relevant information.

RankBrain UX

RankBrain is a machine learning process that is part of the Google ranking algorithm. One of RankBrain's tasks is to analyze some UX signals and find out which websites users prefer to visit for a given query.

This means that Google can improve a website's ranking if there is evidence that users prefer it over other websites that are already better positioned in SERPS.

How does this all relate to website design?

When users like a web page it means they are spending time on this page, reading the content, interacting with the site and visiting multiple pages.

Creating an optimized website is an ongoing process that requires constant analysis and testing. But you shouldn't start making changes to what you think is best. Instead, you should make changes based on informed decisions by analyzing user behavior on the website.

Analyze user behavior on the site

Programs like Google Analytics can help you get information on how users behave on the site.

You can view different tools and find out:

· The time users spend on a web page and site

· The bounce rate of a page

· The main landing pages

Knowing this information helps you to understand which pages require more attention and, above all, to measure the impact that the optimization techniques adopted have brought to the website.

Conclusion

SEO web design is about creating websites that are popular with both users and search engines. Don't spend all your time on the visual aspect of a website, but pay more attention to user experience and usability.

A website that looks good on desktop but is too slow on mobile devices won't help you get traffic and better organic rankings. What users (and search engines) want are websites that are fast, secure, and optimized for mobile devices.

Test your website and analyze user behavior using different tools and make informed decisions on how to improve the website design, structure and content.

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