SEO

Top 12 Website Design Guidelines For SEO In 2022

Want to become an expert on using SEO when designing your website? Read on to discover the top 12 guidelines for SEO-friendly website design.

MAKE SURE YOUR SITE NAVIGATION IS SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY

Using Flash for navigation on your website can be bad news if you aren’t aware of making Flash objects accessible and web-crawler-friendly. Search engines have a callous time crawling a website that uses Flash. CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript can provide almost any of the fancy effects you are looking for without sacrificing your search engine rankings.

PLACE SCRIPTS OUTSIDE OF THE HTML DOCUMENT

When coding your website, make sure you externalize JavaScript and CSS. Search engines view a website through what’s contained in the HTML document. JavaScript and CSS, if not externalized, can add several additional lines of code in your HTML documents that, in most cases, will be ahead of the actual content and might make crawling them slower. Search engines like to get to a website’s content as quickly as possible.

USE CONTENT THAT SEARCH ENGINE SPIDERS CAN READ

Content is the life force of a website, and it is what the search engines feed on. When designing a website, make sure you consider the good structure for content (headings, paragraphs, and links). Sites with very little content tend to struggle in the search results, and, in most cases, this can be avoided if there is proper planning in the design stage.

DESIGN YOUR URLS FOR SEARCH FRIENDLINESS

Search friendly URLs are not URLs that are hard to crawl, such as query strings. The best URLs contain keywords that help describe the content of the page. For example, think about the following URLs for an HVAC website:

hvacompany.com/services/repairs/

hvacompany.com/services/residential-repairs/

hvacompany.com/services/commercial-repairs/

BLOCK PAGES YOU DON’T WANT SEARCH ENGINES TO INDEX

There could be pages on your site that you don’t want search engines to index. These pages could be pages that add no value to your content, such as server-side scripts. These web pages could even be pages you are using to test your designs while building the new website. Don’t expose these web pages to web robots. You could run into duplicate content issues with search engines and dilute your real content’s density, hurting your website’s search positions.

DON’T NEGLECT IMAGE ALT ATTRIBUTES

Make sure that all of your image alt attributes are descriptive. Search engines will read alt attributes and consider them when determining the page’s relevancy to the keywords a searcher queries.

UPDATE PAGES WITH FRESH CONTENT

If your website has a blog, you may consider making room for some excerpts of the latest posts on all of your web pages. Search engines love to see the content of web pages changing from time to time as it indicates that the site is still alive and well. With transforming content comes greater crawling frequency by search engines as well.

USE UNIQUE METADATA

Page titles and descriptions should all be different. Often, web designers will create a template for a website and forget to change the metadata. What ends up happening is that several pages will use the original placeholder information. Every page should have its own set of metadata; it is just one of the things that help search engines get a better grasp of how the web site’s structure is constructed.

USE HEADING TAGS PROPERLY

Make good use of heading tags in your web page content; they provide search engines with information on the structure of the HTML document, and they often place a higher value on these tags relative to other text on the web page.

INCREASE INTERNAL LINKING ON YOUR WEBSITE

Internal linking can boost the rankings of your website when used correctly. It helps Google understand your content better and sets an informational hierarchy for your website. Websites with information are consistently correlated with each other. It is beneficial for people and search engine bots when relevant information leads them to further knowledge.

MAKE YOUR WEBSITE MOBILE-FRIENDLY

Whenever a query is entered in the search bar, Google will rank websites based on several factors, but mobile-friendliness is one of the primary factors. Thus, Google requires webmasters and businesses to create a mobile-friendly websites.

IMPROVE YOUR PAGE SPEED

Nobody has the patience to tolerate a loading website nowadays. With so many options available at our fingertips, people swiftly switch from one site to another to look for the desired products or services. Thus, you’ll lose the potential rankings and leads if your site’s speed is low.

Need help with website design? Get in touch with our team for expert advice.

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Chris Beckwith-Taylor

Chris Beckwith-Taylor is a marketing innovator, known for progressing the multifamily industry forward with his behavior-based, data-driven approach to digital strategy. Beckwith-Taylor currently guides all strategic digital and technology initiatives across Green Stick Marketing's growing business portfolio. Before launching his marketing agency, Chris was the Vice President Of Marketing at The Franklin Johnston Group, where he was responsible for the strategic marketing and leasing efforts across the organization's 20,000-plus conventional, senior, and affordable assets. Chris also worked as the National Marketing Manager for Fore Property Company, where he ran the lease-up efforts for new apartment developments in Denver, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Orlando, and Portland. Prior to joining Fore Property Company, Christopher managed the advertising for over 150 multifamily communities at CoStar, a commercial real estate information and marketing provider based in Washington, D.C. Beckwith-Taylor’s marketing experience began in 2006 as a leasing consultant in Chicago for Village Green, a management company based out of Farmington Hills, Michigan. He last served as a Regional Marketing Director there, overseeing sales, marketing and assisting with business development initiatives.