Web Design And SEO – Things You Need To Know.

SEO is one of the greatest tools for businesses to grow their audience, and it is often overlooked during the web design process. In order for a website to be fully SEO optimized, web design and SEO must be integrated together. Many businesses only begin thinking about SEO when the website is completely designed and ready for content to be added to it. For a website to be SEO optimized, web design and SEO must be developed hand-in-hand. SEO must be a critical part of the website design process. This post addresses how this integration should be done to increase the domain authority of a website and enhance the presence of the business in the internet.

Page Speed

Even today, millions of people have slow internet connection. Combine that with web pages having a more complicated structure than before and you have a recipe for slow page speed. For example, using front-end web application frameworks requires loading several JavaScript files that slow down the page load speed. This is one of the main causes of high bounce-off rate. If it takes 5-10 seconds for the page to load, one is guaranteed to have lost at least 50% of the audience already. Thus, the website should clean, not overstuffed, and follow best speed optimization practices to decrease loading speed. MOZ provides a great guide on page speed and SEO optimization.

Site Navigation

Google bot is, as the word itself implies, a bot. In order for it to be able to crawl the website successfully and understand where each content is located, the site navigation of a website should be precise and clean. Sitemaps tell google how the website pages are structured and how pages are related.

HTML Structure

The HTML structure of a page tells Google bot where the main content is, what the content is about through using headers and title, and how everything is related together. This helps the bot understand the content and what they key concepts are so it can better place the page in the search world. SearchEngineLand has a great article on how html structure and code affects search ranking.

Mobile-friendly and responsive design

Another factor that search engines look for is whether the website is mobile-friendly and responsive web design. This is a characteristic that is confirmed to affect the ranking of a website in search results. In today’s world, mobile has the highest internet market share by device, at approximately 52%. That means more than half of internet users access to internet using smartphones, which is why mobile-friendly design is such an important factor. A website that is not mobile optimized is a red flag signaling an old and decayed technology. Next time you are making a website design, do not make the mistake of putting SEO aside until content creation. Web design and SEO are two elements that are developed simultaneously, rather than one after the other. Now that you are equipped with useful knowledge and links to posts about the importance of factors in web design and SEO, you are ready to design your website. Should you have questions or comments about this post, or if you want to contact our Miami web design company, contact us through the navigation bar or leave a comment below.