Having a great website is like having a digital version of your business brochure or card. It’s an effective tool to impress people and draw their attention.

However, as SEO became more popular, it started to matter less if your website had a cool aesthetic or was well-designed. Even if your website looks neat, if it’s not optimized for search engines, it’s less likely to attract the visitors you want to reach.

In today’s extremely competitive business environment, it’s essential for your business to align its web design with an SEO strategy. An effective perspective to adopt is to look at web design and SEO as two sides of a coin. Ideally, these two should support each other to help achieve a successful online presence.

Web Design And SEO: How They Work Together

Without aligning your web design and SEO strategy, no one will discover your brand. People who already know your business may appreciate the well-designed layout, but it will be invincible to anyone searching for things related to your services and products.

On the other hand, having a good SEO without taking care of your site’s web design is even worse. When users visit your website and difficult to navigate, slow to load, and looks unprofessional and outdated, it can harm your brand and its reputation. Eventually, this causes search engines to rank you lower in the search results.

As you can see, neither element can work perfectly without the other. When you have a good web design and SEO, it gives your business the best chance to attain your goals of increasing traffic, generating leads, and converting new customers.

8 Ways To Design An SEO-Friendly Website

Check these ways to design an SEO-friendly website:

1. Partner With An Expert

Designing an SEO-friendly website is a daunting task, especially for business owners who know nothing of the technicalities involved. With that said, if you want to get this task off your hands, you can let an expert do the job.

For instance, hiring expert web development in Toronto can help you build a website that’s customized for your business needs while ensuring that it’s fully equipped with SEO features that reach and appeal to your audience.

2. Make Navigation Easy

The goal of websites is to provide information about your services and products to potential buyers. And visitors often favor websites where information is easy to find.

With that in mind, it’s important to make it easy, seamless, and natural for users to move from one page to the next. The easier it is for users to find what they need, the more likely they’ll be converted into customers. Also, focusing on navigation reduces confusion, which consequently reduces your site’s bounce rate (number of visitors leaving the site quickly) and improves your rankings.

3. Ensure Mobile-Friendliness

The convenience of using mobile devices has led to an increase in mobile browsing. This means that a website that’s not mobile-responsive will lose to its competition. Thus, it’s important that your site is accessible regardless of the visitor’s screen size.

Not only will this create a better user experience, but it also increases your chance of ranking higher since it’s become a ranking factor for the Google search engine.

4. Make The Design Light

Search engines and internet users don’t like to wait around for pages to load. Thus, you need to keep your website’s load time below the 3-second threshold to avoid poor user experience, higher bounce rate, and unfavorable SERP (search engine results pages) ranking.

To prevent these undesirable consequences, you need to design a lighter website that can load faster. You can do this by making your design minimalistic. Make use of more white space and stick to a single font. You also need to make short web forms and utilize smaller images for faster loading.

5. Caption Images And Videos

Most people only optimize the text on their site and forget about the images and videos they use.

Keep in mind that SEO strategies are strongly reliant on search engine spiders. This means that your site’s performance depends on how these spiders view your content. Captioning is a sure way to ensure that these spiders can capture all information from your website, including images.

Make sure to use appropriate keywords to caption your videos and images, allowing them to rank during organic searches. It also helps your site when users are searching for specific content like pictures and videos. Also, make sure that images and videos are placed strategically. The more relevant they are to that page, the better your website’s ranking.

6. Ditch The Infinite Scrolling

Infinite scrolling was once a popular element on websites. This feature allows more content to load as a user scrolls down. While it’s an effective way to make a user stay on your site, it’s not good for SEO.

Search engines will only crawl a single page. This means that if you use infinite scrolling, bots will miss out on a lot of your content, making it difficult to rank for queries.

7. Be Careful With Flash Elements

Using too many flash elements on your site not only distracts your visitors but also affects your site’s ranking.

Using flash elements makes it more difficult for search engines to rank your site since it’s often devalued or ignored. This means that it won’t add anything to your website’s SEO performance, reducing it to nothing more than a flashy display.

If you’re going to use flash, make sure you do so sparingly.

8. Use Descriptive URLs

Your website’s URL should also be optimized for search engines. Each webpage should have an easy-to-understand URL that describes the content of the page.

Never use underscores to separate words. Instead, use hyphens. You can also include a few relevant keywords to make it more SEO-friendly. As opposed to URLs with random letters and numbers, optimized URLs can help search engines understand your pages and make it easier for users to remember.

Also, consider limiting the categories in your link and keep your URLs short.

Conclusion

A good website should accommodate modern SEO practices to survive in the competitive online environment. By designing a website that ticks all the SEO boxes, you can create a professional-looking website that can reach your targeted audience and become one of your most profitable mediums in the digital world.