SEO for web designers

Website design plays a massive role in a brand's successful presence on the web. It delivers the key message, drives engagement, and turns visitors into brand ambassadors. It is increasingly influential in achieving marketing, advertising, and branding goals. However, little do entrepreneurs know that it thrives when empowered by search engine optimization, a technical aspect often overlooked.

Adjusting website design to SEO principles is usually the last thing on one's mind. However, when conversions and revenue are at stake, search engine optimization helps drag prospects into the sales funnel and turn them into warm leads. 

Having a mind-blowing website design is not enough to generate much-needed organic traffic. Optimizing it for search engines is what a company needs to appear on the top search results. SEO-friendliness increases organic visibility and findability amplifies ranking with the target audience, ensures optimal user experience across devices, and builds a strong brand reputation and positioning.

Let's consider the importance and techniques of SEO web design to see how to implement it in your web project to efficiently achieve your marketing and branding goals.

The SEO-friendly design implies creating a web page optimized for search engines. It is the technical and design process of improving a website's ability to be identified, crawled, analyzed, and indexed by a search engine's mechanism, known as a crawler. In practice, dev teams must balance functionality and design and enhance the website across various areas to increase its visibility and ranking in the SERPs.

The two basic postulates of SEO web design are:

1. Website structure should make sense to crawlers so they can understand its content, navigation, and overall website architecture.
2. The technical side of a website must be perfected to meet high standards of security and accessibility.

The importance of SEO-friendly design might be dubious at first glance, as it contradicts impressive content and design solutions. Nevertheless, it is part of an impact-driven strategy that will significantly benefit the company in the long run. Consider what it can do.

First, it increases the website's visibility online, which translates into more traffic and prospects who might become leads or brand fans. 

Second, it improves user experience, leading to higher brand satisfaction, stronger customer relationships, and reinforcing the company's position in the market.

Third, it amplifies brand awareness and builds a strong brand reputation. 

Finally, it underlies a solid foundation for the company's digital growth.

The relationships between web design and SEO are not evident. However, as a website's appearance affects visibility and customer satisfaction, it might drastically impact search engine rankings and findability.

A good case in point is mobile-friendly behavior. Suppose your design is not optimized for cell phones, providing a confusing and intimidating user experience. In that case, Google and other search engines are unlikely to rank you high in their results as they require web projects to meet their high standards for mobile accessibility.

Another good example is using detailed yet heavy images that might slow down interaction with the web page. Not only does long loading time scare away users, who start to lose interest after two seconds of waiting, but it also signals to search engines that the technical side of a web project requires improvements. The bigger the loading time, the less chance the website occupies the top position in the search engine results.

Finally, too many ads, promos, videos, or graphical elements might be effective in generating quick leads but devastating in establishing a long-term brand presence in search engine systems, as crawlers might misunderstand the content and context of such pages, resulting in irrelevant search results.

SEO web design is a complex concept that implies optimization across various areas. It covers multiple technical and content factors that dev teams must enhance to ensure proper optimization for search engine crawlers. Here are the top five key components to focus on.

Responsive and mobile-friendly design

While responsiveness and mobile-friendly behavior are different concepts, they often work together to make the user experience on a device comfortable and productive.

Responsiveness ensures that the website gracefully adapts to multiple screen sizes, whereas mobile friendliness implies that users get the best navigation and usability on the most miniature gadgets. Both are critical to search engine crawlers' ability to rank websites higher.

Technical side

The technical side implies everything lying on the back and forming the foundation for the front end. Although it is invisible to regular online visitors, it is essential for search engines. With a secure foundation that usually includes HTTPS connection and clean and valid code structure, websites help search engines fight cybercriminals and malware attacks on users, earning respect and better ranking in SERPs. 

Website speed

Unlike HTTPS, website speed is a noticeable and tangible technical aspect of a website. It is so critical that Google ranks better companies when their speed is high. This is because it affects user experience and demonstrates how well the company handles the back end of its digital property.

Depending on such factors as image optimization, server response time, browser caching, and even CSS and JavaScript, it is the main sign of the company's poor or good decisions and behavior.

Website architecture

Website architecture describes the structure and relationships between a website's inner pages. It covers everything from the home page to categories to the last page of your site. It is a roadmap for search crawlers to move along your web project and understand your site's crucial connections and details like links and tags. It helps to find and index all your site's pages and provides additional context.

A well-thought-out website architecture ensures superb usability and smooth navigation, which affects not only Google and other search engines but also end users. 

Optimized content

This is one of the most prominent players in creating an SEO-friendly website. It is what users seek and crawlers "eat." It is the main reason why a company appears in search results. Therefore, it must be high-quality, relevant, and keyword-optimized to meet the target audience's needs and provide crawlers with all the necessary information to deliver accurate search results. 

Links

Internal linking is a part of effective roadmapping for search engine crawlers. They assist search engines in understanding the structure of a website and the relationships between pages and content. They are used to create clusters and clean navigation structures to guide crawlers and users along the project.

Creating a logical URL hierarchy

The structure and hierarchy of website URLs are some of the most critical factors that impact your website's search engine optimization. It can boost your online visibility and presence in top positions in the search results.

When it is logical, well-thought-out, and meaningful, it contributes to user experience as it is easier for visitors to understand the page's content with just one glance at the URL. 

There are specific criteria according to Google's guidelines for URL structure to meet:

• user-friendly, concise, and meaningful.
• feature keywords relevant to the target audience.
• descriptive to crawlers so they can get the context.
• mirror the site's hierarchy and content structure.
• be appropriately encoded, preferably using UTF-8.

The organizational structure of internal links (aka URLs' hierarchy) must be logical, user-friendly, meaningful, and flexible enough to create any content hierarchy you want.

Here is some actionable advice to achieve this in your website URL's structure.

First, familiarize yourself with Google guidelines for URL structure. Although the hierarchy might differ for different projects, these recommendations help avoid common mistakes and confusion among users and crawlers.

Second, have a brand-related domain name powered by a good and respected hosting company. While you may use keywords in your domain name, they are not recommended as they do not reveal your unique company's personality and vision.

Third, use secure HTTPS protocol. Encryption of communication makes the company look trustworthy and credible in the eyes of search engines and their users.

Fourth, use lowercase letters. URLs are case sensitive, which means the browser and crawler understand capital and small letters; considering them differently and sticking to lowercase is preferable when typing, as it might eliminate confusion and errors.

Fifth, add a sitemap to your website to help crawlers navigate all site pages. 

Finally, use the Google search console. Submit your website there so search engine crawlers can easily find and index your pages. This platform might help you with URL inspections, which are crucial for defining inconsistencies and introducing improvements.

Importance of mobile-friendly design

The importance of building a mobile-friendly website design cannot be stressed enough. Just consider the recent stats that demonstrate the prevalence of mobile audiences on the web: 

• A staggering 6 out of 10 internet users access the internet using a mobile phone, with 74% admitting to returning to a website if they have a good user experience.
• Almost 80% of modern websites are mobile-friendly.

Over the past decade, website traffic originating from mobile devices has changed. It has significantly increased, demonstrating the primary trend in web surfing: people prefer visiting websites through smartphones and small gadgets. 

This means ensuring your website's optimal mobile-friendliness has become critical. Not only does this help to meet growing demands, but it also brings some substantial benefits. 

First and foremost, mobile-friendliness meets Google's current standards, which require websites to work correctly and coherently across small devices to rank them higher in SERP. 

Second, it enhances user experience. Mobile-friendly features improve navigation, reading, and storytelling, ensuring seamless exploration of web projects on a small screen.

Third, it increases the brand's visibility. A mobile-first website delivers your brand message to a broader crowd, potentially generating new leads and fans.

Finally, it helps to stay ahead of the competition. By perfecting mobile optimization, companies may overtake those who have not yet caught up with the trend and gain a competitive advantage. 

To create a mobile-friendly website design, start with a thorough concept understanding. Please note that responsive and mobile-friendly mean different things, although they pursue similar goals. Get all the critical details of the approach and only then devise a strategy to introduce the concept without ruining your information structure. Here are the best practices:

• Improve navigation: use slide-out menus, hamburger menu icons, functional footer, and properly highlighted links.
• Optimize visual content. This practice implies resizing, compressing, and reconsidering visual media choices. For instance, if some of your pictures make mobile users scroll for long, it is better to ditch them.
• Take into account typical areas and interactions. On mobile phones, users do not have the luxury of being pixel-precise with the mouse cursor. Therefore, make sure buttons, links, icons, and tiny navigational cues are easily accessible and touchable.
• Reconsider typeface style and size.

There are many more tips you should reconsider and re-design to optimize a full-screen website to mobile sizes. When doing so, please remember that ensuring harmony between content and functionality is crucial to secure superb usability and user experience. This could be challenging; therefore, hiring a professional web design agency is highly recommended.

Optimizing visual elements

We have already mentioned that not all images should belong to mobile-friendly website designs. The deal is that you do not have the luxury of a vast space that allows you to unfold your story in all its glory. On smartphones, even the big ones, you are limited.

No one likes to scroll along the page infinitely to get to the point. Your mobile website should be quick and easy to navigate, prioritizing key brand messages. Therefore, optimizing visual elements that might distract attention, leave a poor impression, and slow down the page load is crucial.

The most popular techniques for optimizing the visual content of mobile-friendly websites are:

• Use faster-loading image formats. The most efficient and lightweight way to display your visual elements is to convert them into the WebP format developed by Google. Since September 2020, it has been supported across the latest devices and significant browser versions.
• Resize your images according to their purpose. Please avoid full-screen photos on cell phones as they might intimidate and confuse readers.
• Take image storage and maintenance seriously. Ensure your server has 99.9% uptime. Consider using a CDN, which serves images through data centers closer to your visitors worldwide, thereby minimizing loading time.
• Implement lazy loading to meet the needs of mobile users still on 3G. Not only does it improve the user experience for those with slow connections, but it also amplifies loading time for others.

Finally, compress photos and pictures using professional software. You might even use minified versions of your images, icons, and less detailed or color-intensive illustrations. Please consider storytelling, user experience, and loading time when optimizing images. The latter must be prioritized, as customers usually leave a web page after just three seconds of idling.

Implementing schema markup

Schema markup is one of the most critical steps in technical preparations when adapting website design to SEO standards. Populating a web page with structured data that tells search engines all they need to know about the content and context of the page offers numerous benefits for companies.

When done correctly, it helps search engines understand your content to generate better search results and demonstrate it through rich-format snippets. This leads to accurate results and better customer targeting, which means relevant organic traffic to your website and more satisfied users. Plus, it gives you a competitive advantage over companies that ignore this concept.

Schematic markup is a set of key and value pairs describing key messages and details that search engines can understand without extra interpretation. It comes in various types, giving website owners flexibility in creating accurate descriptions.

There are 800 types, ranging from the most generic to specific ones. However, you do not need to use them all. You need only those relevant to your content. Moreover, search engines do not recognize all of them. For instance, Google handles only 35 of them.

The most popular and widely recognized schema markups are articles, breadcrumbs, events, images, logos, products, reviews, and site links search boxes. They can be communicated to search engines using three basic coding methods.

The first method uses JSON syntax that organizes data in name-value pairs separated by commas.

The second method uses the microdata principle based on lengthy HTML tags and attributes compared to JSON.

The third method utilizes the Resource Descriptive Framework in Attributes (RDFa). It also uses standard HTML tags and attributes.

Although implementing Schema markup does not require coding skills, it is highly recommended that you delegate this task to a web design agency to avoid mistakes and inconsistencies. 

Enhancing site speed and performance

Site speed and performance are among the top reasons users bounce. Even a tiny detail like loading time may become catastrophic for website owners. If it takes more than 3 seconds to show your website to viewers, you lose your precious traffic, as no one likes to wait.

The same goes for website performance. Slow, inconsistent, and glitchy interaction with the user interface pushes away even the most loyal fans, leaving a poor general impression.

Optimization of web page speed and overall performance must be a top priority. Not only does it help to keep your customers with you, but it also offers numerous advantages. First of all, it positively affects search engine optimization. For instance, Google likes fast websites, prioritizing them over others. Second, it helps the company meet high web standards. Third, it underlies a solid foundation for marketing efforts. Finally, it reinforces the brand's reputation and image on the market.

Many factors affect website pages and performance. It could be images, videos, interactive details, scripts, network conditions, and hosting locations. Here are the most popular recommendations to follow:

• Test website performance to locate weaknesses and areas for improvement. Do it regularly to understand how new features impact overall performance.
• Optimize images through professional software. Try to reduce dimensions and resolution as well as compress files themselves.
• Limit the number of HTTPS requests to the server and use of external scripts.
• Use browser caching.
• Minify CSS styles and JavaScript's.

Finally, invest in the technical side of your website. First, use a fast and reliable hosting provider with high uptime. Second, consider a content delivery network (CDN) to cache web content in locations close to your target audience. Third, use only time-proven, reliable, and secure scripts and solutions. Finally, secure your website from malicious actors, as their attacks may dramatically decrease performance.

It might take several days for search engines to discover, crawl, and display your pages in search results. However, when they are revealed to the public, the time has come to monitor and improve your website's SEO. 

Optimizing a website for SEO standards does not stop with the site launch. You must be even more attentive and careful about your website's performance as you add new information and features to realize marketing, advertising, and branding strategies. 

Monitoring helps companies introduce a proactive rather than reactive strategy that is more cost-effective and beneficial as it decreases risks of faux pas and prevents terrible scenarios. Here are key methods for refining your SEO side after site launch:

• Develop an effective SEO strategy. Define short—and long-term measurable goals and reachable milestones and objectives. Involve content strategy, advertising, marketing, and branding.
• Boost your website's visibility and findability by adding links and promoting quality content on social media.
• Redirect your old sites if you have any.
• Create relevant keyword-infused content.
• Give each page a unique meta description and optimize the title tag for each primary keyword.
• Devise a link-building strategy. There are multiple ways to do that. You may reach influencers, ask friends, or create content for platforms popular with your target audience.
• Track and improve website speed and loading time.
• Ensure mobile-friendliness and accessibility.
• Track customer engagement metrics and analyze bounces.
• Work on domain authority and rating.

Finally, set up Google Analytics and add your website to Google's Search Console to understand how people find and use your website, what content is relevant, and what might help you optimize and improve your website's performance.

Building an SEO-friendly website design might be challenging, as you must adapt your content, marketing, and branding strategy according to SEO principles. It might even require you to sacrifice your mind-blowing design solutions, beloved interactive features, or gamified experience to ensure the website works great on small screens or loads fast for the target audience with a slow internet connection. However, it is worth it. 

SEO-friendly website design benefits companies across the board. It builds strong, healthy, credible relationships with Google and other search engines, increasing the brand's visibility and findability and ensuring high-quality organic traffic. It also improves user satisfaction and drives engagement.

Optimization of website design for search engines starts with thoroughly understanding the basics and influencing factors. Then, companies must improve website visual content for better page performance, introduce schema markup, and create a mobile-friendly version. Finally, they must monitor their websites to spot weaknesses and introduce timely improvements.