To launch your web design portfolio the right way, you need to design your website in line using this recommended web design SEO plan. Find out how to set-up your website appropriately for SEO.

Basically, a regular website designer is expected to have some basic skills in HTML coding and CSS programming.

Sadly, most web design experts possess little or no SEO knowledge which is needed to deliver a good website that offers SEO value moving forward.

Hence, this post is written to unravel SEO features that must be integrated into every web design project to get the website function in line with important search engine algorithms.

Let’s have a ride!

What is Web Design SEO?

Basically, web design search engine optimization can be described as a website development process which ensures that a website is search engine friendly.

To design a website for SEO, you need to understand SEO techniques like On-page optimization and Off-page optimization.

Why is SEO important in Web Development?

The purpose of designing a website is to provide a virtual platform where prospective customers can engage with your business in a seamless way.

Therefore, to ensure that web users engage with your niche website seamlessly, you need to ensure that your website is designed with SEO in mind.

Quickly, let’s unravel why SEO is very important to the success of your web design project.

#1. User Friendliness
#2. Google Algorithms
#3. Lead Generation
#4. Site Authority.
#5. Brand Awareness.
#6. Crawlability and Indexation.
#7. Keyword Targeting

USER-FRIENDLINESS

Seriously, how do you react to a snail-paced website?

Ideally, internet users are impatient when it comes to waiting for a web page to load in response to their query or keyword search.

In fact, if a website page fails to load in 3 seconds, then there is a high probability that users will bounce out of such a website without minding how attractive its aesthetics or contents are.

The implication of a website having a high bounce-rate is that the search engine interprets such web behaviour as one triggered by low-quality contents or poor user experience.

GOOGLE ALGORITHMS

Google Algorithms has evolved over time.

From Google Panda to Penguin, Google Hummingbird to RankBrain algorithm changes, each of these search engine algorithms highlighted the importance of SEO for websites.

Hence, to avoid getting your website fizzled out of the search results, there is the need for your web design process to align with these algorithms.

Avoid a website design that falls short of a good UX and poor on/off-page optimization procedures which is an important ranking factor highlighted in the RankBrain algorithm of 2015.

LEAD GENERATION.

Obviously, I believe that one of the major reasons behind your decision to launch a website is to generate leads for your brand or business.

Usually, it is expected that a website which records high conversion rate tends to have a solid formation of on-page optimization.

Therefore, you need to ensure that the website is appropriately optimized for the search engine so that high converting organic traffic can be driven to your website as you build page authority.

SITE AUTHORITY.

Even though it takes a lot of consistent effort for a new website to gain domain authority, nevertheless, it is important for you to kick-start such effort from the scratch of designing your website.

Starting from the choice of your domain name and web hosting packages, you’ve got to understand that a poor web navigation could jeopardize link-building efforts which is a critical tool in gaining site authority.

So, there is no gainsaying that your new website must have a clear navigation system that supports great UX and cross-linking.

BRAND AWARENESS.

Trust me, you’ve got to give a voice to your Website!

Hence, it is important for you to optimize your website in a way that makes it easily get found on the search engine through Local SEO and International SEO strategy.

Alongside, you cannot weave the need for you to curate optimized contents both for text searches and voice search for each page on your website like the ‘About Us’ session and other sales pages or product pages.

CRAWLABILITY AND INDEXATION.

Getting the search engine robots to easily crawl and index your site is a function of how you have appropriately set-up its link structure for easy crawling.
Usually, the permalink structure must be optimized to get search engine bots to easily understand what a page focuses on in relation to other distinct pages across your website.

Designing a website without a clear XML sitemap will keep your site below the pile on the search results because the crawlers will not be able to properly understand what existing and new pages on your site are all about.

#7. KEYWORD TARGETING

You’ve got to understand that designing a website without proper optimization using keywords related to your niche or industry will greatly cloud the visibility of such website.

Therefore, if you are serious about getting your found quickly on the SERPs when a user sends a query to the search engine, you’ve got to target keywords.

Depending on your keyword strategy-whether long-tail or short-tail, you need to engage in keyword research using tools like Google Autosuggest or Keywords everywhere to gain insight into the volume, competition and CPC values of these keywords which should then be optimized appropriately.

Having identified the need for you to integrate SEO into your web design and development process, let’s now look at how to implement SEO best practices during website design.

HOW TO DESIGN A WEBSITE FOR SEO

As stated earlier, designing a website appropriately for the search engine is very crucial to getting your site easily crawled or indexed.

However, much more than this assertion, an SEO-friendly website ultimately guarantees a website visibility status on the result pages.

Therefore, to get the full juice out of your web design work, you need to work in line with search engine rules.

Here are the details about how you should integrate SEO into your web design plan.

#1. Domain Name Optimization

Undoubtedly, choosing the right domain name for a new website is usually the first call in designing a website.

However, you need to understand how to craft a domain name that suits your online marketing strategy.

This very important aspect of website optimization often gets ignored by most people due to ignorance.

In fact, there are instances whereby a registered domain name tends to be too long or inconsistent with what you’ll find taking a visit to such a website.

For example; you must have seen domain names such as www.abcdefghijklmnopqwxyz.com.

Registering a long-worded domains name could affect the search engine robots to easily categorize what your website is all about.

Mind you, you can decide to use your name to build a personal brand on the search engine.

But for a corporate entity or a niche blogger, you need to include a phrase that relates to what your business is all about before registering it with a web host.

You need to also ensure that all subdomains created under your primary domain redirect to a single canonical version of the main site.

Lastly, endeavor to install SSL certificate which will ensure your new website has an https domain.

Having your domain like this https://example.com is key to getting your website certified for safe online transactions.

#2. Web Hosting Integration

To avert high bounce-rate on your about to be launched website, you need to install a good web hosting package that will ensure a seamless user-experience on your website.

A fast loading site is expected to increase the Click-through-rates [CTR] value of your pages on the search results.

Therefore, you need to secure for your website with a reliable hosting service.

For large-scale businesses with the possibility of recording a high traffic turnover, it is appropriate to consider integrating a web host that has a CDN feature.

CDN is an acronym which means content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN).

It ensures that proxy servers are geographically distributed network through designated data centers.

The goal of CDNs is to deliver web contents spatially with a high degree of availability and high performance.

Hence, CDN feature on your website ensures that your website response time is even for all visitors irrespective of their geographical location.

WP-Engine is a classic example of a web hosting service provider with a super-fast response time.

In addition to buying a very good package for your web hosting, choosing a content management system (CMS) is also a key ingredient in building a successful website for SEO especially if you are just starting out as a newbie.

WordPress hosts over 25% of web contents which shows you its got pedigree of having the necessary features that easily resonate with the search engine.

Installing WordPress is super easy and offers free plugins which you could make use of in embedding additional features to a website.

#3. Install a Mobile-Friendly Theme.

In recent years, Google has emphasized on websites getting easily responsive for mobile phone users due to the increasing dominance of Android mobile phones and tablet devices.

Before now, the majority of search queries used to be initiated from a desktop PC, but the present mobile phone dominance has seen mobile searches take the center stage.

Therefore, to align your website with this reality, you need to ensure that your website is flexible to respond to the uniqueness of all search devices.

This is done by installing a responsive theme into your WordPress which you could get at the range of $30-$60 from Envato market.

Well, I know you are operating on a tight budget, but this is needful if you want to attract and retain millennials who mostly launch search queries from Android and Apple mobile devices.

#4. Clear Site Navigation.

A site navigation can be likened to sign-posts or signals which gives direction to a new visitor.

Against popular views that a web navigation is just about the menu section situated at the top of your web landing page, a site navigation definitely harbors more information.

You can choose to have a global, local, supplemental, hierarchical or contextual navigation schemes for your website depending on the size of your business and online marketing strategy.

The hierarchical site navigation type is the most popular method often used by web designers as it easily guides a user within the site through the drop-down menu.

The global navigation of a website is another segment of web navigation which serves as the outline and template to achieve an easy maneuver for the users accessing your site, while local navigation is often used to guide users across a specific section of the site.

Therefore, it is important you define a clear site navigation route for new visitors checking out on your website.

#5. XML Sitemaps.

Sitemaps is an XML file that lists all the URLs on a website. It is essential for SEO because it informs the search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling.

It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.

Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt which is a URL exclusion protocol.

Hence, it is only appropriate that you integrate sitemaps appropriately for all pages which you want the crawling robot to capture for indexing.

#6. On-Page Optimization.

A website which is deficient in targeting keywords related to your business goals will most likely never get found by anybody on the result pages.

Therefore, you need to optimize each page on your web navigation using targeted keywords.

You might be curious to know how to discover the keywords which people search for in relation to what your business majors on.

Assuredly, there is no big work to be done in getting information relevant keywords which would help your web pages get easily found by internet users.

All you need do is to perform a keyword research using free keyword tools like the Google AdWords Planner.

On a final note…

You might find yourself stalked at some point in this web design article. Never mind!

The idea is to get you in the know about the critical ingredients that will make your website align with basic SEO elements.

If you’ve got no skills using CSS bootstrap or HMTL coding to design your website the SEO way, you can hire a freelance website designer who understands SEO.

This will ensure that your website has a solid foundation to make it thrive on the search engine results pages.

You can drop a comment to let me know your thoughts about this article.

Source: www.seofingers.com/web-design-seo