10 Outstanding SEO Tips to Improve Your Web Design

A beautiful website design is essential for any business seeking online success, but if a website does not have a chance at good search rankings, very few people will ever see it. To prevent having a website that isn’t searching engine friendly, simply follow some fundamental SEO principles and solid content production techniques.

As a web designer, I have given considerable thought to the challenges I have faced and those I have heard others encounter while developing websites with SEO in mind. Here are some terrific SEO suggestions to help you create a more search engine-friendly site design without sacrificing your creativity or style.

1. Make Sure Your Site Navigation Is Search Engine Friendly

If you don’t know how to make Flash objects accessible and web-crawler-friendly, using Flash for navigation on your website can be a bad idea. Search engines have a difficult time indexing Flash-enabled websites.

CSS and unobtrusive design JavaScript can give practically any of the glitzy effects you desire without jeopardizing your search engine rankings.

2. Place Scripts Outside of the HTML Document

Make sure to externalize JavaScript and CSS when developing your website.

Search engines evaluate a website based on what is contained in the HTML document. If JavaScript and CSS are not externalized, they can add several lines of code to your HTML documents that, in most situations, will be ahead of the real content and may slow crawling. Search engines prefer to get to a website’s content as rapidly as feasible.

3. Use Content That Search Engine Spiders Can Read

The lifeblood of a website is its content, and it is what search engines feed on. When creating a website, make sure to consider good content structure (headings, paragraphs, and links).

Sites with the limited content struggle in search results, which may be prevented in most circumstances if sufficient planning is done throughout the design stages. Don’t utilize images for text, for example, unless you’re using a CSS background image text replacement strategy.

4. Design Your URLs for Search Friendliness

Search-friendly URLs are not query strings or other URLs that are difficult to crawl. The best URLs include keywords that help explain the page’s content.

Consider the following URLs for a website about HVAC:

• hvacompany.com/services/repairs/
• hvacompany.com/services/residential-repairs/
• hvacompany.com/services/commercial-repairs/

The URLs listed above are ideal for HVAC SEO. These, on the other hand, aren’t:

• hvacompany.com/services/repairs-final-version/
• hvacompany.com/hvacrepairsforcommercialcompanies
• hvacompany.com/HVACrepairs4CommercialCompanies

Be wary of CMSs that use randomly generated integers and special coding for page URLs. A good content management system will allow you to tweak and “prettify” your website’s URLs.

5. Block Pages You Don’t Want Search Engines Index

You may not want search engines to index some pages on your website. These pages could be server-side scripts or other pages that provide no value to your content. These websites could even be test pages for your designs as you create the new website (which is not advised, yet many of us still do).

Do not make these websites accessible to web robots. You may encounter duplicate content concerns with search engines, as well as dilute the density of your real material, all of which may have a detrimental impact on your website’s search rankings.

A robots.txt file, one of the five web files that can improve your website, is the best technique to prevent particular web pages from being indexed by search engine spiders.

If you’re using a piece of your website as a testing environment, make it password-protected or, better yet, utilize a local web development environment like XAMPP or WampServer.

6. Don’t Neglect Image Alt Attributes

Make sure your picture alt properties are properly descriptive. To be completely W3C-compliant, all images must have alt attributes, but many images meet this criterion by just adding any text. No alt attribute is preferable to incorrect alt attributes.

Search engines will scan alt attributes and may evaluate them when calculating the page’s relevance to the keywords a searcher queries. It is most likely also used to rank image-based search engines such as Google Images.

Outside of the SEO context, image alt properties assist people who are unable to see images.

7. Update Pages with Fresh Content

If your website has a blog, you might want to consider including snippets from the most recent postings on all of your web pages. Search engines like it when the content of web pages changes from time to time because it signals that the site is still active.

Changed content necessitates increased crawling frequency by search engines.

You don’t want to display entire posts because this could lead to duplicate content issues.

8. Use Unique Meta Data

Titles, descriptions, and keywords should all be unique. Many times, web designers will develop a website template and fail to update out the meta data, resulting in numerous pages using the original placeholder content.

Every page should have its own set of meta data; it is merely one of the things that helps search engines understand how the website’s structure is built.

9. Use Heading Tags Properly

Make effective use of header tags in your web page content; they offer search engines with information on the structure of the HTML document, and they frequently place a higher importance on these elements in comparison to other material on the page (except perhaps hyperlinks).

For the main topic of the page, use the h1> tag. Use the h2> to h6> tags to indicate content hierarchy and to separate blocks of related text.

I don’t recommend utilising numerous h1> tags on a single page to avoid diluting your main topic.

10. Follow W3C Standards

Search engines (and who doesn’t?) appreciate well-formed, clear code. Clean code makes the site easier to index and can be a good indicator of how well a website is built.

Following W3C standards nearly requires you to write semantic markup, which can only be beneficial to SEO.