Do you want your business to be on the top page of search results? Then you’ll need to learn about web design and search engine optimization (SEO), which are two key components of SEO. When you construct a site that combines SEO with website design, you allow your company to rank better in search results, resulting in increased visitors, leads, and money.
A superb website is a potent blend of marketing, SEO, suitable web design, and high-quality content. Together, web design and SEO contribute to the creation of an SEO-optimized website. This emphasizes even more how important web designers are to the development of the website as a whole and its online reputation. Web designers must gain a greater understanding of the business aspects of websites to improve their SEO. Website designers should constantly be aware of some fundamental SEO insights in addition to producing amazing designs, as these can make a good impact on their complete site design strategy. Whether you’re creating a new website or redesigning an existing one, we’ll go over the fundamentals of SEO for web design in this piece.
What is SEO Web Design?
SEO web design is the process of creating and developing websites that are SEO-friendly. An SEO-friendly website adheres to SEO best practices such as mobile responsiveness, fast load speeds, and descriptive URLs. Businesses that practice SEO website design make it easier for search engines to comprehend and rank their website in search results, potentially increasing rankings and visitors.
Why is SEO web design important?
So, why is an SEO website important?
Together, they can have a major impact on your company’s bottom line. That is why, if you are thinking about having a website built or renovated, you should first understand why website design and SEO are important – and what this means for your site.
Web design can eliminate or harm your SEO
Many businesses may launch a new site – or rebrand to a new domain name – only to see their SEO progress vanish overnight because they failed to set up 301 redirects. A 301 redirect instructs search engines where to find a moved page.
SEO might affect your web design
When you examine SEO best practices for web design, such as page speed optimization, voice search, and site architecture, you’ll often discover that these elements have a direct impact on how you design your site. Without SEO, you will struggle to rank where you want.
If you skip SEO website design, you’ll likely lose time, money, and rankings. It is more advantageous to combine SEO and web design because your website and its design can serve as a basis for your SEO approach.
Site Structure
Your website’s structure is essentially how users navigate it. A website’s material constantly seems to flow oddly. Every visitor follows this route to get to their goal – the information they’re looking for. Every web designer needs to be aware that their website’s traffic will always be impacted if users are having trouble navigating the site or getting to their intended destination.
The site’s structure is the natural flow of navigation for both novice and seasoned users. The navigation of the website should be designed such that all users may navigate it with maximum ease and without difficulty.
Pages should generally only be accessed by four clicks from the homepage. Making it as easy as possible for consumers and search engines to find material, will improve the SEO of your website. Ensure that the structure is neither difficult for users to use nor a puzzle for search engines.
Code
Designers have several coding alternatives for rendering important design elements on a website. Most people stick to HTML and CSS, and with good cause.
While Flash sites may appear cool, they are exceedingly difficult to optimize, so they have a low probability of ranking well in search engines. Tell your designer to avoid Flash; your SEO will appreciate it.
The demand for a responsive and mobile-friendly web design
In 2017, mobile traffic made up 52.64% of total online traffic worldwide. This suggests that all web designers must recognize that having a mobile-optimized website improves their potential to attract visitors. Search engines greatly favor responsive websites, but this can only occur when web designers handle it correctly.
Your website will adapt to the pixel width of the screen it is being viewed on if it has a responsive web design. This will help to improve and level up the user experience across all devices. The viewers will spend more time on your website if they have less work to do. Therefore, avoid being the website that 57% of online users say they won’t suggest due to a mobile website that is badly built.
Mobile Friendliness
An increasing number of Internet users visit websites using smartphones and other mobile devices, and your site must be accessible to all of them. Not only will this improve the user experience, but it will also increase your chances of ranking well, as Google now uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking consideration.
The easiest way to address this is through responsive design, which ensures that your site is available on all devices and browsers. Responsive design also avoids the chance of duplicate content, which can occur when you have a separate mobile site.
Image Optimization
Web designers play a vital role in shaping the aesthetic appeal of the websites they work on. They are responsible for everything from typography to the use of colors, patterns, geometric shapes, symmetry, and so on. They also choose the photos that will appear on the website.
As a result, optimizing the chosen photos is critical because huge images slow down your web pages, preventing an optimal user experience. Depending on the website builder being used, web designers can optimize photos by reducing file size using a plugin or script. This is also a key lesson in the blogging tips provided by reputable bloggers.
Speed Optimized design
Due to revisions and problem corrections, web developers and designers must be available to the client and team at all times. In their haste, companies frequently overlook optimizing their web design for quick web loading time. Did you know that websites that take longer than 2-3 seconds to load have a greater abandonment rate than others?
The importance of page performance should be emphasized from the start, just as it is while establishing the foundation for the website. If the project manager or customer is inexperienced, web designers must explain the need to invest in a trustworthy web hosting service, as this has a direct impact on the website’s loading speed and other server-side concerns.
Different Tools for Web Designers
Web designers are not expected to be the greatest at managing a site’s SEO, but they should have a basic awareness of how their SEO tips can significantly improve the website’s functionality.
Every site designer should have a few tools at their disposal, including GTmetrix. This tool can help them analyze and improve the speed of their website. It will also give them insights into how well their site loads and actionable tips on how to improve it.
Tools like responsive web design testing may let them test their website’s responsiveness across many devices with varying screen sizes in just a few steps.
Finally, the well-known Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool can assist these web designers by providing a website crawler that allows them to crawl website URLs and retrieve crucial onsite elements for onsite SEO analysis.
Conclusion
Website design and SEO are two moving components of the same entity. As a result, every web designer should strive to expand their understanding of web design to include the critical SEO factors that must be considered before, during, and after a website design project. They must recognize that they are the ones who will start the SEO firestorm. In an attempt to integrate the site’s SEO into the design process, we think that our fundamental SEO insights for web designers will be extremely useful to both seasoned and inexperienced web designers.
The relationship between web design and SEO is complex, but we hope this page has helped to make it clearer. If you have any queries about how your site combines the two, or if you are thinking about starting a design or redesign project, Digi Tech Resource Group, LLC can assist.
Our company’s professional team of designers, developers, and SEOs is eager to help you create a functioning and visually appealing website. In the last five years, we’ve created more than 1,600 websites and helped our clients make more than $6 billion in income! Contact us online to learn more about our SEO programs and website design services!