Website Design and SEO – Top 10 Elements for Online Success

Website design and SEO seem unrelated at first glance, but the two are more interrelated than you might think. Does web design affect SEO, and why?

Your website design affects SEO for these reasons:

• It’s more difficult to index your website
• Low-quality visuals reduce how long the average visitor stays
• Too many elements reduce site loading speed
• Outdated design makes it more difficult for users to engage

Today’s guide will further explore the relationship between SEO and website design. We’ll also recommend 10 SEO elements to add when you create a website to enhance the user experience.

What Is SEO for Web Design and Why Is It Important?

Most business owners understand that SEO is the difference between their site ranking well or falling to the second or third page of search results. Still, they don’t necessarily know which factors influence their search engine optimization one way or another.

Google and its SEO ranking algorithm will look at various ranking factors to decide where your site lands. They include:

• The accessibility and security of your website
• Your page loading speed
• Whether your site is mobile-friendly
• Accurate business information
• Social signals
• Links
• Quality of the user experience
• Technical SEO
• Optimized content
• Domain authority
• Domain URL and age

Website design and SEO are intricately linked. As we discussed in the intro, if you don’t have an SEO-friendly website, the search engine crawlers that index your site will struggle to do so.

This can cause the crawlers to create an inaccurate site architecture, which hurts your SEO standing. 

Even if the crawlers get the job done correctly, you’ll still fall behind in the SEO rankings if you have poor site architecture.

Users will also be unable or unwilling to engage with your site because it looks horribly out-of-date and loads too slowly.

According to a Neil Patel survey, 30 percent of respondents said they’d wait only six to 10 seconds for a site to load before abandoning the website. Another 20 percent will wait 20+ seconds, but patience wanes from there.

For all these reasons, utilizing website design and SEO packages is within your company’s best interest.

How to Design a Perfect SEO-Friendly Website

Now that you understand the link between website design and SEO services, you’ve turned your attention back to your website. How can you design it with SEO principles in mind so your site has a better chance of ranking higher?

We recommend starting with these elements.

Choose Your CMS

CMS stands for Content Management System.

You’ll recall in that bulleted list above that search engine algorithms look for optimized content, so implementing a CMS if you’re not already using one will greatly benefit your company.

The front end of your CMS should include a homepage with at least your five most recent posts. You’ll also need all the articles on a listing page and a view article page so users can pick and choose which content they want to see.

Then, on the back end, you need edit and delete options for published content, the option to add new content, and administrative access.

Building a CMS database uses advanced coding techniques such as MySQL and PHP. If you hire website design and SEO services, they can help you navigate through this code to get a functional CMS database up and running quickly.

Consider the Site Structure and Navigability

Next, it’s time to turn your attention to the site structure. Structure affects website navigability, so it’s critical to your SEO website design.

A good website structure resembles a pyramid. It starts with your homepage and then branches off into categories and even subcategories, such as singular web pages or posts.

If you don’t follow this structure when designing your website or organizing the elements therein, users will struggle to navigate.

You already know that the average Internet user doesn’t have a ton of patience for a badly designed website, so take the time to restructure your site elements.

Add the Theme, Colors, and Fonts

The last part of the process is more fun. You can add website themes, colors, fonts, and other visual elements.

Don’t choose these at random. The colors, fonts, and themes must play nicely with one another, or you’ll further hinder website appeal and even navigability in some cases.

Portfolio resource Dribbble reports that, among 1,000 websites, Sans Serif remains the top font choice. That’s followed by Arial, Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Robot, and Open Sans.

Those fonts all have something in common, and it’s readability. They’re also standard fonts that most computers come preloaded with so you don’t have to worry if users can read your font when accessing your website from their mobile devices or desktop computers.

What about colors? WordPress theme resource Colorlib states that 46 percent of consumers prefer blue. Another 30 percent like green, and 23 percent are yellow. Despite that, most logos on company websites are black.

You shouldn’t necessarily choose popular colors but hues that make sense for your company. For example, many companies use logo colors for their website color scheme.

Here’s some more food for thought. Colorlib also found that 26 percent of users like primary colors for website color schemes.

The Top 5 Advantages of SEO for Website Design

Focusing more on website design and SEO will benefit your company exponentially. We could easily write an entire post dedicated to the perks, but we’ve narrowed it down to five of the most important benefits.

1. You Don’t Have to Spend Extra Money to Significantly Increase Your SEO Standing

SEO is one of those areas where you should work smarter, not harder.

If your current SEO isn’t working because of poor website design,  you can funnel all the money in the world into your SEO campaigns. At the end of the day, your site will rank no better.

You can spend as much money as you’ve set aside for SEO now but focus it on website design and SEO packages. Once you create a more efficient website, your SEO standing will naturally rise! 

2. Your Website Will Reach a Larger Audience

One of the advantages of a better SERP position is increased visibility. More leads will find your website, broadening your audience and increasing the number of leads in your sales pipeline.

With your keen eye on a website redesign, you’ll have hopefully implemented opt-in forms and lead magnets to incentivize leads to share their contact information. Now you can capitalize on this new influx of leads.

3. You’ll Enhance Customer Satisfaction

SEO-focused website design is all about bettering the user experience. When customers land on your website and can find what they’re looking for, they’re happier and likelier to return to your site again.

4. You’ll Have More Credibility

Living in the age of the Internet as we do, many customers’ first impressions of your company will be your website. A slow-loading, poorly-designed website can absolutely damage your company’s reputation.

By improving your website design, besides the advantage of a better SEO ranking, you’ll enjoy the byproduct benefit of coming across as more credible.

5. You’ll Have a Competitive Advantage

Customers expect well-designed websites. If all your competitors have such websites but your company doesn’t, that puts you well behind the pack. 

Redesigning and optimizing your website with SEO principles in mind levels the playing field.

You could even gain a competitive advantage if your site surpasses the competition in the rankings.

10 SEO Elements to Implement During Website Design

With your website refresh on the horizon, these 10 SEO elements must go into your new design.

1. Indexing

One of the most important elements of SEO and web design is indexing.

Known as Internet or web indexing, indexing refers to the organization and inclusion of elements on your website, such as metadata, keywords, and related webpage content.

Google uses this material when crawling your site to determine if the average user can understand your content strategy and find what they need on your website. The better-indexed your site is, the greater its SEO ranking. In order for your site to be indexed properly, make sure to build an XML sitemap and add it to Google Search Console.

2. HTML Tagging

Even if you’re not a coding guru, you can still incorporate HTML tags into your website design for a better SEO position.

HTML tags tell a search engine which content areas to add to a SERP display so you can become more findable on the Internet.

Here are some HTML tags your website needs:

• Canonical tags to prevent duplicate content
• Robot meta tags, which create indexing and crawling rules that search engine algorithms will use to rank you
• HTML5 meta tags such as

1. Nav (for isolating navigational elements or menus)
2. Footers (for isolating the bottom of a page and its metadata)
3. Header (for isolating the top of a page and its metadata)
4. Aside (for setting supplementary content aside)
5. Section (for isolating parts of a blog post)
6. Article (for isolating an article from other code for portability

• Schema markups for rich SERP snippet enhancement
• Image alt text (more on that to come)
• Heading tags H1 through H6
• Title tags for creating SERP headlines

3. Permalink

Permalinks or permanent links are SEO links designed to remain intact for years. The best permalinks feature SEO keywords and are short and unique, so they’re less likely to succumb to link rot.

You can make any link on your website a permalink, but you must choose wisely. The quality of your links does inform your SEO standing, so if your links are low-quality, you could hurt your SEO efforts rather than help them!

4. Metadata

Your SEO and website design must include metadata, which informs other data.

For example, look at any file on your computer. You’ll see information such as the file size, the date you created the file, the date you modified it, and the author of the file. Those are all examples of metadata.

Webpages can use meta tags to create metadata. Here are some common tags to incorporate:

• Meta robots attributes such as follow/nofollow or index/noindex. These tags provide instructions for search engines on your website.
• Meta descriptions.
• Title tags.

5. Alt Text

Websites use alternative text or alt text in XHTML and HTML as a secondary source of text if an element doesn’t render properly. 

For instance, if an image doesn’t show up on your website, you should write descriptive enough alt text that a user can envision the image without having to see it.

6. Internal Linking

All websites have a substantial number of internal links. By connecting those links together, you’re helping search engine algorithms discover facets of your website and build relationships between the links.

Pages or posts with many links usually have a higher value than those with fewer links, and that goes for external and internal links alike.

That’s no excuse to stuff a page full of meaningless links, though. That hurts your SEO standing. 

7. Responsive Design

Throughout this entire article on website design and SEO, we’ve touched on the importance of a responsive, mobile-friendly website design to connect with your audience and appear higher in search engine results.

This is just one more reminder to prioritize your website design!

8. Targeted Keywords

Keywords have a relationship to SEO outside of people typing in keywords on Google, you having those keywords on your site, so your site appears well in the SERPs.

Ideally, you should use keywords as descriptors for your website and content.

Search engines will comb through your keywords, connect keyword usage to content relevancy, and determine how your site should rank.

9. Security

Search engines cannot push websites with poor security to the tops of results pages. That would be a huge disservice to users, who would end up with viruses or even become the victims of phishing schemes.

Your site must have airtight security if you hope to rank better.

10. Speed

The last element of website design and SEO is speed.

As we discussed earlier, the average user doesn’t have a lot of patience for a slow-loading website. The average loading speed of today’s websites is one to two seconds, so your site has to get up to speed if you’re not already!

How to Monitor SEO Performance

Monitoring your SEO performance needn’t be a struggle. This section will divulge what you should look for.

How Long to Wait

As much as we wish it could be, SEO isn’t an overnight process. Your company should prepare to wait between four and six months to see results in terms of ranking.

If more time has elapsed and you’re not rising in the ranks like you had hoped, then it’s time to change tact.

Which Tools to Use

You should rely on an assortment of SEO tools to streamline your processes, from marketing SEO tools to keyword trackers and performance measurement tools. You can even find some of these tools for free!

Hiring an Agency for Website Design and SEO

For website design and SEO services, you can also entrust an agency to deliver results. Mediaboom is a marketing firm that specializes in SEO. Our services can revitalize your website as we redesign it with SEO rules in mind.

Contact now Mediaboom to boost your website design and SEO