How to Build a Website That Ranks in Search Engines | SEO and Web Design (2023)

Consumers and search engines are two significant factors to consider while creating a website.

You'll need an SEO-friendly website to appear on Google when customers look for your stuff. However, you'll need a creative, user-friendly website to help customers locate what they're looking for.

Finding a balance between being user-friendly and SEO-friendly is a challenge for site owners, especially when there are hundreds of goods offered. To make matters even more complicated, many organizations have distinct SEO and web development teams. Even if both teams are in-house, getting them to collaborate on a beautiful and functional website may be difficult. The development team will strive to make the site's visual and user interface as simple as possible, while the SEO team will ensure that there is enough material on the site for Google to rank it successfully for user search queries.

So, how do you strike a compromise when you're getting contradictory advice from both sides?

In this essay, we'll go over what SEO web design is, why it's vital, and what 10 things you should optimize to achieve common ground between these two objectives.

What is SEO Web Design?

The technique of improving a website so that it ranks well in search engines is known as SEO (or search engine optimization). The design and building of a website and all of its pages is known as website design.

When you combine the two, SEO web design refers to the planning and development of a website that is optimized for search engines. It goes through the SEO recommended practices that web designers must adhere to while creating websites.

Why is SEO Web Design Important?

How will people find your company website if it has a beautiful design but no one can get any of its web pages to rank in search engine results?

While social networking and PPC advertisements are wonderful for driving visitors to your website, it's also crucial to identify organic (read: free) techniques to increase traffic and rank on page one of the SERPs (search engine result pages).

Let's look at a few of the most important advantages of SEO web design.

SEO Web Design Increases Organic Traffic

Any traffic to your website that comes from search engines and isn't paid for is known as organic traffic. These are people that came to your website after searching for something on Google and looking at the top results.

To be more exact, the first search result receives nearly a quarter of all clicks, the second search result receives 15%, and so on.

Because the 10th result receives 2.5% of all clicks, it's reasonable to infer that everything past page one has poor organic traffic. This is why you should build and optimise your website as much as possible in order to improve your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs.

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SEO Web Design attracts high-intent traffic

When someone performs a Google search, it's because they have a specific question for which they're looking for answers. And they'll click over to your page when it appears at the top of the search results with that precise solution.

While they may not convert immediately after seeing your site, they are now aware that they may contact you if they have any further queries. Because they were looking for anything in your sector, this top-of-mind brand recognition is great for generating conversions.

Having high-intent traffic is even more valuable than having other types of visitors, which is why it's critical to optimise your new website for higher search engine ranks.

SEO Web Design improves the user experience

Every dollar spent on UX yields a 100-fold return or a 9,900% ROI—but that's not the only advantage. If you want to please Google's algorithm, your website must be SEO-optimized while simultaneously being user-friendly. Google has modified its criteria to include indicators linked to user experience in your results.

Some of these parameters, according to Backlinko's research, are:

• Dwell time
• Bounce rate
• Mobile usability

Increasing the effectiveness of your website SEO is a crucial component of any marketing plan. It guarantees that your website functions properly and is simple to browse so that visitors can locate the information they need.

Google only wants to rank the top websites so that its own user experience isn't harmed by bad ones. As a result, having a high-ranking site promotes user confidence while also assisting them in finding exactly what they're seeking.

SEO Web Design gets the most from your marketing budget

Implementing an SEO plan might take some time, but the modifications are usually free. With a little website expertise, many business owners can set up SEO settings themselves, or they may delegate it to someone on their staff.

The idea is that SEO is a low-cost method for assisting your website in meeting its marketing objectives and increasing its total return on investment.

10 Things to Optimize for SEO Web Design

Let's speak about how you can optimize your website now that you know why SEO web design is so crucial. To make incorporating these 10 elements as easy as possible, keep search engine optimization in mind throughout the whole site design process.

After all, you don't want your web construction team to spend months building the site just to have your SEO team rip it up, prolonging the process. Having the two teams collaborate on each of these elements throughout the design phase, on the other hand, helps to simplify the entire project.

To rank a webpage, Google's search algorithm considers over 200 parameters. It's difficult for a single designer to account for everything. Instead, begin by optimizing the ten components listed below to improve your page's ranking:

1- Mobile-friendliness

Mobile accounted for 55 percent of all global traffic in 2021. Three-quarters of the world's population is anticipated to utilize just smartphones to access the internet by 2025.

A responsive website not only improves your SEO but also guarantees that your target audience has a consistent experience regardless of whether they're using a computer or a mobile device to view your site.

Take a look at this website from The Sill as an example. For keywords like plants, home plants, and where to buy house plants, they're on page one.

Its desktop webpage appears to be as follows:

And here is how its mobile website looks:

The mobile version is still simple to use and follows the same search and checkout flow as the desktop version, which is natural for an e-commerce site.

Make sure you or your development team test your website on both desktop and mobile as you create it. Because Google implemented a mobile-friendly upgrade to their algorithm in 2015, responsive sites now score higher in search results, this is an important ranking element.

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2- Website Speed

As of 2018, the speed of your website is another consideration in Google's algorithm. It's understandable—no one likes to deal with a slow-loading website. As a result, Google will not show it to them.

The following factors can have an impact on the speed of your page:

• Web hosting
• File sizes
• Plugins
• Coding/scripts
• Traffic volume

Fortunately, Google has a free tool called PageSpeed Insights that allows you to enter your website URL and check where you stand.

Your website will receive a separate score for desktop and mobile, as well as a number of metrics to assist you to figure out how to enhance your page performance and, as a result, your rankability.

3- Sitemaps

While Google is extremely intelligent, it's never a bad idea to provide a hand. And a sitemap is precisely what it's for.

A sitemap is a file that contains all of your website's web pages, files, videos, and other content. These are useful for websites that have a lot of distinct pages, especially if they aren't all linked to one other.

This allows Google to locate and crawl all of your web pages, making them all rankable. After all, if Google can't locate your website, you won't get any organic visitors.

4- Readability

Readability is another important ranking criterion. If your website visitors can't read the content, they aren't obtaining anything useful from your company.

To guarantee that your website, its headers, and content blocks are simple to read, best practices recommend using strong, bold serif or sans serif fonts throughout.

Look at how easy it is to read the headline and website material on this bold, crisp website front page:

Teachable users quickly comprehend what Teachable can do for them. Furthermore, using header tags in your material aids Google in recognizing the most significant elements of each page, which improves your SEO.

If you're going to employ script typefaces (i.e., if they're part of your branding), use them exclusively as an accent font, as seen in this Edloe Finch example:

5- Image File Names

Image file names are so short that you might not even notice them, yet they can be a huge help when it comes to website SEO. So, before you call something home-page-header-final-2.jpg, think carefully.

Instead, use keywords and adjectives to help Google figure out what's in the picture.

Image file names in this part of Method's website, for example, maybe:

• aluminum-hand-wash-bottle.jpg
• refillable-soap-pouches.jpg
• rainbow-cleaning-products.jpg

6- Alt Tags

In a similar vein, alt tags are required for your photographs. This is critical for a variety of reasons.

For starters, photos are retrieved for about a quarter of all Google searches. According to data, visual search capabilities are preferred by the majority of younger searchers (62 percent).

Google's algorithm can tell what's going on in your photographs thanks to alt tags. Your image may appear in a user's search results if it fits their query.

Your alt tag should be a complete statement that defines what is in your image, beginning with a capital letter and ending with a period.

Second, it makes you more accessible in general. Individuals who use a screen reader to view your website will be able to comprehend what is portrayed in your photos, allowing those who are blind to have a positive user experience.

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7- Website Navigation

Typically, web developers are concerned with the site's overall appearance, feel, and user experience. Designers and developers will be concerned with the visual aspects of a website and how users interact with them. They like to make things as easy as possible, especially because mobile device users have long outnumbered those who use desktop or laptop computers.

Your website navigation, on the other hand, should include internal connections to your most significant product or feature pages.

Take a peek at this Visme sample.

Dropdown menus in their navigation lead to the most significant pages on their website. This helps to increase the number of internal links for each of the navigation pages. This is because each page using this navigation counts as a separate internal link, resulting in an exponential increase in the total number of links.

These subcategory sites should target the keywords they want to rank for in order to rank higher on SERPs.

Site navigation becomes even more important when dealing with huge e-commerce sites with hundreds or thousands of goods.

REI's website is an excellent example of SEO-friendly site navigation, with a wide menu for each of the site's categories. When you click on the ‘Snow' category, for example, you'll be sent to a large list of subcategory sites.

Because nearly all organic search results are subcategory pages, having a dedicated page for this phrase is extremely beneficial from both a search and user standpoint. When you Google ‘boy's corduroy trousers,' the majority of the results are product sites rather than subcategory pages, as seen above. This implies that instead of creating a special subcategory page, you could probably optimize a product for that term.

When optimizing for humans and search engines, there are a few more things to think about:

• Making use of a content hierarchy This categorizes and subcategorizes the pages on your website. If a page has more than a dozen goods, you might want to consider creating a subcategory page.
• Page-to-page cross-linking. The SEO and content teams develop helpful blog articles, FAQs, and other information that can help drive more traffic to product pages and vice versa. Horizontal linking allows customers to quickly access additional information about your products and/or organization while also assisting your SEO efforts.
• There is no need to think. Finally, navigating your website shouldn't take much mental effort. Your website should make it apparent where people should go.

8- URL Structure

The structure of your URLs should also be based on your SEO strategy. Only your web page or blog post's focus keyword should be included in each URL slug.

Make sure to conduct keyword research for each page you intend to include in your website's launch design or overhaul. Do the same thing for each new page you make along the way.

This assists Google in determining which keyword(s) to rank your pages for while also ensuring that your pages are accessible. Because the majority of target keywords are simply a few words, your URL slugs will be easy to remember and put into a URL field if someone is seeking a certain page.

9- Metadata

The title tags and meta description are examples of metadata (or meta tags). This is the data that shows up in Google's search results. Make sure your metadata is optimized since 36 percent of SEO professionals believe the title tag is the most crucial SEO factor.

Here's an example of a as-educate search result:

The focus keyword for your website or article should be included in the title tag and meta description to improve SEO. The length of your title tag is limited to 60 characters, while the length of your meta description is limited to 160 characters.

10- Indexable Content

If a search engine can readily crawl a site, which means it can easily explore, read, and understand the information on each page, the site is deemed SEO-friendly, and the chances of the pages showing in search engine results pages increase significantly.

The major material on each page should be in HTML text format for the site to be crawlable, as this is the easiest method for Google to grasp what the page is about.

“A site is deemed SEO-friendly if a search engine can easily crawl it—easily examining, reading, and interpreting the information on each page of the site”

as-educate

The usage of JavaScript vs. HTML is one of the most difficult issues that web development and SEO teams face. Because webpages are built with JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, and others, HTML is wonderful for Google but lacks the functionality that JavaScript provides. As a result, many developers prefer to utilize JavaScript to customize the site's appearance and functionality.

However, owing to factors like code mistakes, client-side rendering, and so on, all of these distinct JavaScript applications might cause complications for search engines. Downloading, rendering (parsing, compiling, and executing JS code), fetching external resources, and finally indexing that information takes a long time for Google. The more JS libraries you have, the more resources Google needs to crawl and index that data. This is something that both teams should be aware of, as it has an influence on site performance and Google's crawl budget.

Additionally, you should always check to see if Google can crawl and index your site's content. Running a fast search on Google using the exact wording on a certain page is a quick technique to see if the site content is visible.

If your site doesn't appear when you copy and paste the text into Google, you'll need to debug the JavaScript coding to figure out what's wrong and work with the development team to come up with a viable solution that allows Google to crawl and index your material.

In the end, visitors want a site that loads quickly—40 percent of users would quit a site if it takes more than three seconds to open. It's in both teams' best interests to produce a site that looks nice, has the information a user requires and loads quickly.

Yes, you may find a balance between the necessity for JavaScript and the need for a site that is SEO-friendly. You may look for ways to make JavaScript function for your site without causing SEO concerns, which benefits everyone.

Walking the Line Between SEO and Design

Bridging the gap between web development and SEO is essential for a well-designed, SEO-friendly website. Encourage your teams to collaborate from the start so that your website is thoroughly optimized for search engine optimization and usability.

Remember that the greatest method to rank in search engines is to provide value to your customers. To increase your search results, optimize the factors listed above, publish great content, and provide top-tier user experiences.