Web design for SEO: How to build a website that ranks highly on search engines

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Web design means many things to different people, however building a site that ranks well on search engines should be part of the initial web design.

This should be an intrinsic part of your planning process and you should discuss this with your web designer. When you create a site that nails SEO and web design, you make it possible for your business to rank higher in search results, which translates to more traffic, leads, and revenue.

What web design features are search-engine friendly

An SEO-friendly website follows SEO best practices. This means building in specific web design features such as the following:

A mobile-friendly experience.
Fast load times.
Descriptive URLs.
Search engine friendly content.
Web page design that encourages users to read and engage with content.

All businesses are different and there is no shortage of advice, however the principle of building an excellent website and telling people about it is key.

Here are some key fundamentals:

Fundamentals: Domains, hosting and CMS.
Crawling: The technical bit.
Information architecture: How to structure your SEO-friendly site.
Mobile: Mobile-friendly sites need more than just responsive design.
Page speed: Fast sites make for happy users.
Usability: Confuse them and lose them.

Fundamentals of web design for SEO

Domain name

Your domain name is the entry point into your website, and there should be one single (canonical) domain. You may have others, but they should all point (redirect) to this one.

Hosting

Slow hosting creates a poor user experience and ultimately creates a site that Google is not so keen to show in the search results. Buy the best web hosting you can afford and discuss the options with your web designer.

CMS or code

Your choice of CMS (content management system) or web coding platform depends on your utterly unique requirements. Ensure you understand why you are using a given platform and don’t just end up with the one your web agency likes to work with. Although we really like WordPress here!

Crawling

Search engines such as Google and Bing send out search bots which crawl websites, gather information and report back to their search engine index. Your website needs to be crawlable to ease this process so search engines can automatically figure out what your website is about and how it matches search engine queries.

Indexing

To understand your site, search engines have to be able to read the content of the page. This means that the main content of your site should be text-based.

Where you have rich media such as videos and images,

Link structure

To index your content beyond the home page, you need internal links that the search engine can crawl and reach deeper into your website.

Information architecture

Arrange your content logically. Bear in minds that a website is not a book where people read in page order. They will skip around the content so the structure and menu become very important.

Your site is the filing cabinet. The major categories are the drawers. The subcategories are the folders in the drawers. The pages are documents in the folders.

Cabinet: Your website
Drawer: High-level category
Folder: Subcategory
File: Individual document/page

Some sites may take a deep approach to structuring content. Others may take a wide approach. The important takeaway is that things should be organized in a way that makes sense and simplifies navigation and discovery.