What is SEO Friendly Web Design? 10 Vital Factors

Do you know why SEO friendly web design is important? Having a well-designed and fast website is a necessity for any business in today’s world. However, if no one knows about a website, it doesn’t matter how good it is. SEO is one of the most cost-efficient ways to drive traffic to your website.

SEO friendly web design can help businesses reach wider audiences without spending extra money. Plus, relevant organic visitors will bring more leads and sales! SEO friendly websites get more organic traffic than websites that are not optimized.

Keeping the best practices for SEO friendly web design in mind during the web design process holds critical importance.

SEO Friendly Web Design Best Practices

Now, let’s check the 10 best practices for SEO friendly web design.

1) Crawling and Indexing

First and foremost, you need to make sure that Google can easily index your website. “Crawling” is the process of search engine bots visit the pages of our site by following the internal links or external links(backlinks). Search engine bots consider several components of a website such as content (text and images) and code during the crawl process.

Indexing means search engine bots storing our pages in a database considering various metrics. Your website’s every technical SEO aspect must be solid for ensuring seamless crawling and indexing.

2) Robots.txt

Robots.txt is used for giving instructs on crawling the pages on a website to the search engine bots. Robots.txt file can instruct whether bots or user agents can access parts of your website. This kind of instructions are indicated by “disallowing” or “allowing” specific actions of user agents. Therefore they can be very useful in regulating how bots access and index content on your website.

3) Mobile-Friendly Web Design

Mobile-friendly websites provide a better user experience. Users can easily navigate your website on any device. As well as providing a great user experience and increasing conversions, mobile-friendly websites are favored by search engines and tend to rank higher up in their search results as well.

Responsive web design is the most effective and affordable way to get a mobile-friendly website. When responsive web design is used your website works perfectly on any device. Also, it is necessary to design multiple websites for desktop and mobile devices. Elements on your website respond and adjust to the screen size of the user’s device.

4) Website Speed

Website speed has a huge effect on SEO. Page loading time is a confirmed ranking factor. Also, the site speed is one of the most important criteria that regulate the relationship between the user and the website. The first impression is always very important, regardless of the sector or niche. If the page loading takes more than 3 seconds, visitors might just leave your website.

Therefore, website speed is an extremely valuable component in terms of both SEO and user experience.

5) SEO Friendly URL Structure

Search engines take a webpage’s URL into consideration as well for determining what page content is about. SEO-friendly URL structure gives information to the search engines and users regarding the page content. directly through the concise URLs. SEO-friendly URLs usually contain few words. Also, they include the target keyword.

6) Website Architecture for SEO Friendly Web Design

The way a website’s pages are structured and linked to each other is important for SEO. This is called website architecture. An SEO-friendly website architecture makes it convenient for users and search engine bots to access the content they want. What’s more, proper website architecture sends the link authority to the pages on a website.

Every website has different needs. However, keeping it simple and using the flat website architecture which allows visitors and search engine bots to access any page on your site with 3-4 clicks is preferable.

7) Canonical Tags

Even the slightest difference in URLs can be viewed as a separate page by Google and other search engines. Canonical tags (also known as “rel canonical”) are used for giving information on which URL represents the canonical version of a page to search engines. Canonical tags prevent “duplicate” content problems. In short, the canonical tag specifies which version of a URL you would like to appear in search results.

8) Unique and Keyword-Focused Content

Keyword research is one of the first stages of an SEO process and one of the most important building blocks. Because choosing the right keywords for SEO strategies is extremely important in order to achieve the conversion goals.

Research should be carried out in accordance with different strategic purposes. As businesses have different needs and goals, tailor-made keyword research approaches are necessary for different websites. Once the keywords are determined they should be properly included in the unique website content. However, keyword stuffing and over-optimization must be avoided.

9) Image Optimization

Image optimization matters! It has two main aspects. First of all image sizes must be reasonable. While uploading images is important, page load time is vital as well. Reduce the size of your images as much as possible for not causing the page opening time delays.

The second part of the image optimization is explaining what the image is about to search engines. When we see a picture, we can easily understand what’s going on in it. The problem is this is not the case for search engines. So it is necessary to help search engines to understand what the image is about.

We can give information about an image to search engines with “alt texts“. What is image alt text? Briefly, they are texts written by us, so that search engines can understand images.

10) User-friendliness

User-friendliness of a website is important for SEO as well. Accessible tabs, easy navigation, a theme that is easy on the eyes and a web design that allows the user to easily find what they are looking for are among the features of the user friendliness. Thus, the visitors can have a smooth and enjoyable user experience which would improve the metrics such as bounce rate and visitor engagement. These user signals affect the search engine rankings.

Hope enjoyed our post outlining the main factors for the SEO friendly web design!