SEO Principle

For web design companies, website design goes beyond simply putting together a functional framework. It must embody the critical SEO principles to work smoothly, fare well with search engine algorithms, and stay easy for the audience to navigate. Even though it is time-consuming, SEO companies spend time and effort getting websites to comply with SEO principles to ensure they show up right on top of search engine ranking results. The effort needed for a well-performing website goes beyond creative agencies creating stellar visual assets for the websites.

Here are 9 essential SEO principles any web designers need to know before launching a new website.

1 – Structure of your website

Site structure is extremely important as an SEO tactic. Search engines employ crawlers to scan websites, looking for new content. These crawlers also index the websites, a list of URLs stored by search engines. That’s why every web designer needs to ensure the website is easy enough for crawlers to do their job.

To achieve this, the website structure should be such that it leads the users to exactly where they want to go. The more difficult you make navigation, the harder it is for crawlers to understand what every page offers. Secondly, it is also important to undertake interlinking so that crawlers can find different pages on the website. The homepage of your website should provide the key information you want to convey to your users, and you can always break that down into several subpages. However, ensure that the site hierarchy is restricted to three or four layers to make the content easier to locate.

A bonus tip is to add an XML sitemap to your website. This can make the job of a crawler easier, as it lists all the pages you want them to discover.

2 – Pay attention to the structure of the URL

Your website’s URL plays an important role in search ranking. Having a short and semantically correct URL can help ensure the algorithm understands what your website is about.

Add descriptive keywords in your URL and separate them with hyphens for better readability. Ensure that the hierarchy of your website is reflected through the URL. For instance, if you are creating a URL for a blog post on your website, ensure that the URL showcases the path leading from the homepage to the blog section of your website.

3 – Take care of the images on your website

Adding high-quality images to your website improves the user experience. However, it is also important to optimize them properly so that they can help you rank. There are a few things you can consider doing for the same:

When you name your image files, use the right keywords. You can also use hyphens to separate them and make it easier for the crawlers to understand what the image contains and how it is relevant to your website’s content.

Add the appropriate alt-text attribute to your images. Alt text makes the images more accessible for those users who rely on screen readers to navigate a website but also aids crawlers in comprehending the image. The more care you take to describe the website content to your users, the easier it is for the algorithm to help you rank.

Best practices for adding alt text include:

• Keep it crisp for better readability. Some screen readers do not support alt text over 125 characters.

• Always add relevant keywords, but steer clear of keyword stuffing, as this can result in the search engine algorithm penalizing you.

• Ensure you are not using alt text to regurgitate what is already written on the web page simply. Alt text aims to provide additional context to the existing content by describing the images added.

4 – Check whether the website is mobile-friendly

With the increase in mobile users, a mobile-friendly website is necessary, given its direct impact on SEO and ranking.

The easiest way to check a website’s mobile friendliness is to use Google’s mobile-friendly test. For optimal performance, make sure that you pick a mobile-responsive theme for your mobile website. You also need to check how the navigation of your desktop site performs on a mobile device. For instance, an extensive navigation menu that works seamlessly on desktop or double-bar navigation may not be suitable for mobile devices.

Other ways of ensuring the mobile-friendliness of a website include:

• Eliminating the use of excessive pop-ups
• Sticking to a readable font style
• Spacing out the links on your website
• Minimizing the volume of content and including only essential information that quickly catches the attention of the user
• Adding images that are specifically optimized for mobile devices to reduce lag

5 – Take care of on-page SEO

On-page SEO elements of a website play a crucial role in ensuring SEO compliance.

Pay attention to the length of the content on your website, the structure of the presentation, and the different keywords used. Ensure that the content that every user sees on a website before scrolling down creates a solid impression and keeps them engaged in exploring the rest of the website.

Use industry terminology without making the content sound too full of jargon to the extent possible. Depending on the topic, decide the ideal length of each piece of content. Apart from primary and secondary keywords, also add semantic keywords in your content as if you are answering popular user questions through the content.

6 – Pay attention to the website speed

A website that takes too long to load can be bad news for SEO, as page speed is an important ranking factor for the search algorithm. In fact, a study published by Google revealed that up to 53 percent of visits get abandoned when the website takes more than 3 seconds to load on a desktop or more than 15 seconds to load on a mobile.

Improving load times is critical for ensuring better SEO. There are a few easy ways to achieve this, such as:

• Reducing the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files across the website
• Enabling browser caching so that each time a user visits, the website is only required to load a part of the website
• Minimizing the number of redirects
• Getting rid of bugs and tags from the code
• Optimizing images and videos properly

7 – Check the heading tags

Crawlers cannot comprehend your website’s content without appropriate headers. Headings can be incredibly useful here, providing useful clues to the bots and helping them understand how the information is organized on your website.

Headings are also helpful for your website visitors, as they allow them to quickly scan the website and identify the critical information they are looking for.

When adding headings to your content, be mindful of the order of importance. Headings shouldn’t be used as a mere accessory to make your text look better- they should be directly linked to the text to which they are added. The most important heading should be marked as <h1> heading and followed by other lower-level headings such as <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc.

8 – Be smart about your CMS

The content management system or CMS you choose for your website can make or break your SEO ranking. CMS allows you to seamlessly publish and update content on your website, even when you don’t know any coding.

Any CMS you choose should allow you to easily edit the URL, title tag, alt text for images, headings, and meta description. The core web vitals parameter, which includes LCP (largest contentful paint), FID (first input delay), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), should also be supported by the CMS. Lastly, the CMS should also help you generate a robots.txt file and XML sitemap to help the search algorithm locate all the pages that need to be found.

WordPress, Drupal, Wix, and Magento are some of the most popular CMSs web designers prefer. If set up correctly, all of them can do wonders for SEO.

9 – Don’t forget to secure your website

The last point to remember is the security of your website, which directly impacts SEO efforts. If your website is not HTTPS, browsers can flag it as a not secure website, reducing the traffic and ultimately hampering your ranking. It would help to be careful about any spam content added to the website. Hackers often use spam content links to redirect users to their pages. However, these pages are extremely suspicious, and you usually don’t want to be associated with them.

As a website designer, be mindful of the software updates needed to enhance your website’s security. Be cautious about installing plugins, as some may have errors that make it easier for hackers to access your website.

You cannot design a high-performing website without implementing SEO principles.

Before you launch any website, check for these 9 SEO principles. They can attract more attention from the audience and drive quality traffic, increasing your chances of showing up at the top of search engine rankings.