Why Designing and Developing an SEO-Friendly Website is Important in 2022

Creating an attractive business website with good content is not just enough in 2022. Whether you are operating a business on a small or large scale, we prefer to have a unique website that is user-friendly, appealing and conveys information about what we have to offer. For any business with a website or an online presence, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plays a vital role in gaining more popularity across the web and for your audience to notice you. Your website is the heart of your business for a digital marketing presence, but most industries fail to understand the importance of incorporating SEO practices into the web design process. When re-designing a website, search engine optimization is almost always an afterthought for businesses. Enterprises that have implemented SEO practices during the web design process tend to be more successful with their websites.

Importance of Developing an SEO-Friendly Web Design

SEO-friendly websites result in proper Google and other search engines crawling each page on the website efficiently, interpreting the content effectively, and indexing it in their database. With better SEO strategies and a team integrated into the web design process, the better the chance of indexation and ranking on the first page of the search results. Building an optimized website requires meticulous consideration and strategic planning to represent your business in the best way possible. 

HTTPS

Operating a website means having a valid SSL certificate that should be addressed during the web design development and process. HTTPS adds security and privacy to a website, allowing search engines to recognize the validity and preventing third-party tampering. According to Google, all websites must switch to HTTPS as site security is now a ranking factor.

Structured Data

A standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content, structured data consists of numbers and values and is generally stored in a database. Schema markup is an official Google tool for testing your structured data to see which Google-rich results can be generated by the structured data on your page. It is a semantic vocabulary of tags that you can add to your HTML. Adding schema markup allows your content to become eligible for rich snippets in search results.

Mobile-Friendly Design

Operating a user-friendly website means accessing the website through any device. At its simplest, mobile-friendly design means your website’s information – images, texts, videos, links – is easily and readily accessible across all different platforms, particularly on the much smaller screen of smartphones and tablets. It is designed to work the same way across devices. The best mobile-friendly website designs prioritize what information is displayed in certain places. Since Google switched to mobile-first indexing, your content is primarily ranked and indexed using Google’s smartphone agent, which means that Google now considers the mobile version of your website more when deciding where to rank your website in search results.

Site Performance

Having a business website designed and developed is not just enough. We must assure and keep track of site performance to gain better business outcomes, as it is a major ranking factor for Google. You should ensure your site performs well on desktop and mobile devices. You can use Google’s Page Speed Insights and GTmetrix tools to test and monitor your website’s performance and gather insight into your site’s performance. Core web vitals, testing load time, interactivity, and layout shifting, are now ranking factors for websites. Google ranks websites with better user experiences, so your goal should be to provide the best experience possible for your users.

SEO Techniques

SEO techniques are divided into two categories – white hat and black hat.

White Hat Techniques

The category white hat technique is acceptable by the search engines and is the recommended way of improving rankings. They add value to a website’s SEO by providing a great site  design experience and increasing rankings, traffic, and sales from Google and other search engines.

Black Hat Techniques

Black hat techniques are deceptive and result in Google penalties or being banned by the search engines. Earlier, the technique was used to achieve high rankings quickly. However, the search engines have updated their algorithms to detect such techniques and are constantly using machine learning to uncover additional spam techniques intended to manipulate the SERPs.

SEO Web Design is Essential for Every Kind of Business Success

The role of SEO is to build trust organically with your customer, increase traffic, gain higher revenue, and create a better customer experience. SEO and user experience (UX) work hand in hand with each other. For instance, when your customers have a positive experience with your business it results in more web clicks, increasing traffic, and ultimately increasing your SEO. User experience is how your audience interacts with your website and can easily navigate through your site. As a result, building trust organically builds SEO, and over time you will continue to grow and optimize your digital marketing and your business as a whole.

Hence, the main aim of the business is for users to go to their website and complete a task such as filling out the contact form for your service, ordering a product, signing up for a newsletter, and much more. Moreover, when designing and developing a website, always consider how you want your experience to be while visiting the website. If the site’s speed is slow and not mobile-friendly, you will not have a good experience and will leave the website without viewing. Thus, creating a positive experience on your website is a key to getting the results you want on search engines.