Developing a SEO Friendly Website

Best Practices to Ensure You Have an SEO-Friendly Website Design

It can be overwhelming to know where to start your website design and SEO project. You can begin by mirroring your website’s design based on the following considerations:

• What are your business goals?
• How do you want your target audience to find you?
• What are the marketing trends for your industry?
• What keywords do you want to rank for?
• Of those keywords, which are leading to the most conversions?

From there, you can use this information as the foundation for your SEO-friendly website design. The best practices to keep in mind, or ensure your website design partner is adhering to:

Include copy on the homepage

It may be tempting to keep the amount of information on your homepage to a minimum, but search engines like to see copy on your homepage. An SEO-friendly website design for your homepage should include enough space to incorporate optimized copy that features your keyword search terms. Take a look at an example of tweaking the construction of a homepage that balances both website design and SEO.

The original design didn’t incorporate any space to include optimized content on the page. However, the second, more SEO-friendly website design incorporates a small text box to include enough optimized content to please search engines and humans.

Use keyword research to inform your SEO website design, architecture, and sitemap construction

When you use your keyword research to inform your website construction project, your selected keywords can help with the construction of your SEO-friendly website design. In addition, when you know which search terms your target audience is using, you can use that knowledge to optimize your design strategy and marketing strategy to ensure your content resonates with them.

Common mistakes that can hinder the effectiveness of your SEO website design

There are some common mistakes to be on the lookout for once you’re ready to launch your SEO-friendly website design. Most importantly is to monitor your site’s performance very closely after your new website design goes live. If you notice a dip in the number of customer inquiries or your page rankings on SERPs, notify your website designer or SEO partner. The point of your new SEO website design is to drive more traffic to your site and increase conversions, so if you notice even the slightest dip in your site’s performance, there could be a couple of different problems to consider:

• The no-index tag, which tells search engines not to look for the site during the design phase of your website redesign SEO project, should be turned off once your site goes live. It can be a small but costly mistake not caught early enough.
• The 404 redirects for your website haven’t been properly for all of the URLs for your website, NOT your website’s pages. Your site’s URLs include blog posts, videos, images, PDFs, etc.

There are a couple of tools you can use to ensure your website design and SEO strategy are performing as they should:

• Google PageSpeed Insights – PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster.
• WebPageTest – WebPageTest is an open-source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of its efforts to make the web faster. Note: Make sure you check the “private” checkbox!
• Tenon.io – Tenon.io can identify Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 issues in any environment – even on your local. Because production is a bad place to discover bugs.
• TotalValidator – Total Validator will validate your HTML and CSS, check that pages are accessible, run a spell check, and check for broken links.
• CrossBrowserTesting.com – Cross Browser Testing can help you test your website’s browser compatibility, especially on mobile.

Hire ThePixel to build your next website!

Since our founding in 2008, we’ve created and launched many types of business websites. Over the last decade and we’ve learned a thing or two! That’s why we’re masters of our craft, let us help you build the website of your dreams – one that generates traffic, leads and conversions.

Are you ready to start? If yes, contact ThePixel and one of our representatives will guide you through the website phases and how the process works either by a Zoom Meeting or phone.