Everything you need to know about SEO and website design

Your website is the hub of your digital marketing universe, the source of all digital rivers. Organic search is, of course, the most important source of traffic.

However, all too often, businesses do not consider SEO until after they have a website designed (or redesigned), and as a result, these sites are frequently weak in terms of SEO and digital marketing. They may appear gleaming, but if marketing savvy isn’t baked into the design, you’ll be running the marketing race on a wooden leg. Or, at the very least, facing the prospect of going back to the drawing board and squandering a significant amount of time and money.

At Bowler Hat, we’ve been thinking a lot about the SEO and web design link lately, and we’ve just created a website design planning guide to aid in what can be a difficult process. This is a companion piece to that tutorial that goes into significantly more detail about SEO factors.

In this piece, I’ll discuss why SEO should be a key component of your website design (or overhaul). We’ll look at what you should think about when building a site for search marketing and lead generation, as well as how focusing on happy people keeps the Google gods on your side.

We’ll also look at some of the common difficulties that businesses face when launching a new website that serves as the hub of their digital marketing activities.

In a nutshell, I’ll assist you in making your future website a lean, mean SEO and digital marketing powerhouse.

Developing an SEO-friendly website

An SEO-friendly site, at its most basic level, is one that allows a search engine to explore and read pages throughout the site. The first step to ensuring your exposure in search engine result pages is to ensure that a search engine can simply crawl and understand your content.

A web crawler is used by a search engine for this purpose, and we are attempting to work alongside search engines rather than against them. Unfortunately, there are numerous ways to create a website, and not all technologies are designed with SEO in mind.

Building an SEO-friendly website necessitates careful preparation and an organised strategy to showcasing your company and services. This might be difficult for many organisations because it’s not always easy to document exactly what you do.

Your website should be developed on a solid digital marketing plan with a defined business model and value proposition as a marketing tool. If that isn’t clear, you should go over it again.

Let’s get started, assuming you have everything in order.

Fundamentals

There are a few core elements that set the stage for a well-optimized website design process.

Domains

Your company’s primary domain could be example.com. Others, though, may exist. It’s critical to make sure your domain makes sense and corresponds to what you do. It’s critical to ensure that all versions and subdomains accurately point to the main site and redirect to a single canonical version.

Bowler Hat is the name of our company. We are based in the United Kingdom. We’re a web-based company. There are a couple of domain variations that 301 redirect to the main URL. Everything makes sense.

Don’t be tricked into believing that having-my-keywords-in-my-domain.com is beneficial. It merely appears to be a blunder. It can benefit small businesses a little, but make sure you’re mapping to the real world. Keep your cool.

Hosting

Your web hosting is also crucial. Users will be dissatisfied if your site is slow. Your web hosting should adhere to common sense guidelines. Place yourself where your target audience is. Be quick. If necessary, be platform-specific. WP Engine is a good example because it offers a WordPress-specific platform.

CMS

The CMS (content management system) you select for your company can have a significant impact on its performance. In many circumstances, WordPress is a wonderful solution, but it isn’t the only one. It’s obviously set up in a way that Google can comprehend on a fundamental basis. This isn’t to say it’s the greatest option in every case, but it’s a solid place to start for most firms. Just be sure that the CMS you select is the best fit for your needs, not the one that your web design firm wants to use.

Crawling & accessibility

The first step is ensuring a search engine can crawl your site and understand what it is that you do (and where you do it).

Indexation

They must be able to read the content of the page in order to comprehend your website. This means that behind the scenes, your site’s core content should be text-based. Images aren’t allowed. There will be no flash or video. Even in today’s technologically advanced environment, the majority of your content should still be text-based. There are some fantastic tools, such as web fonts, that allow you to look the part while still allowing your photographs to shine, but be sure to speak clearly about what you do so that the search engine can read and comprehend your offering.

Images, videos, PDFs, and content are very vital and can drive traffic to your site. These must, once again, be discoverable and indexable.

Link structure

Internal links that the search engine can crawl are required to index your content beyond the front page. The search engine crawls your site and discovers new pages thanks to your core navigation, search engine directives, and tools like XML sitemaps. Screaming Frog, for example, can assist you in ensuring that your site is easily scanned by a search engine.

Information architecture and structuring your site

The filing cabinet idea for website structure has always appealed to me. The filing cabinet is your website. The drawers are the most important categories. The folders in the drawers are the subcategories. The pages in the folders are documents.

• Cabinet: your website
• Drawer: high-level category
• Folder: subcategory
• File: individual document/page

The site on which it resides, as well as its location within that site, provide context. Our own site features a drawer for services, with sub-services in folders for each service. The majority of your website will be the same.

Consider the structure of the Bowler Hat website as an illustration:

Home

– Services

– – Service Area

– – – Individual Service

Home

– Services

– – SEO

– – – SEO Audits

So, in this information architecture, there is a page called /audits/.

The /audits/ page can be found in the services drawer’s SEO folder. It’s clean and well-organized. This can be combined with other SEO elements to provide context well beyond that which the document alone can provide.

This applies to blog entries, articles, FAQ content, services, locations, and pretty much everything else that is a part of your company. You want to organise the information about your company in a way that makes it easy to understand.

Some websites may take a comprehensive approach to content organisation. Others might adopt a more broad approach. The key message is that information should be organised in a way that makes sense and makes navigation and discovery easier.

This three- to four-level method assures that most material can be found in four clicks or less, and it works better than a deeper approach to site navigation (for users and search engines).

URLs

The URL provides further context. A logical naming convention gives humans and search engines even more context.

The following are two potential URL sets that could map to the Services > SEO > SEO Audit path outlined above – one makes sense, while the other does not.

www.example.com

www.example.com/services/

www.example.com/services/seo/

www.example.com/services/seo/audits/

www.example.com

www.example.com/s123/

www.example.com/s123/s1/

www.example.com/s123/s1/75/

Of course, the second set of URLs is a purposely daft example, but it serves a point — the first URL naming convention helps both search engines and users, and the second one hinders.

Navigation

Your navigation is also crucial. When a website is well-structured, the navigation works in tandem with the structure, URLs, and other elements such as XML sitemaps to assist users understand what each page or piece of content is about.

Your website’s navigation is more than just the menu at the top. It’s how you direct visitors to the most important parts of your website. Navigation, which includes not only text links but also material on all pages and in the templated design elements of your site, can be used to create awareness of extra services.

The signpost analogy has always appealed to me. I enter a supermarket and look for signage to help me find what I’m looking for. Your website is no exception. When a person is referred to your website and searches for your brand name, they will be directed to your home page. They will then require a signpost to direct them to the appropriate service. And it had best be simple to locate!

It’s really simple to get this wrong, so think about your visitors’ needs and wants before you develop the site. A website is a digital component that should carry out the marketing strategy. It’s critical to understand your users here so you can make sure you’re satisfying their needs.

Navigation should not necessitate genuine cognition — the user should not be forced to think. The image below is a sign from my neighbourhood home improvement business. Which way do you go to get to the car park and which way do you go to get to the deliveries entrance?

I turn right because my head follows the “customer vehicle park” line from left to right. The customer parking lot, on the other hand, is on the left. There’s nothing there to show which is correct or incorrect.

I’ll have to think about it. Or, in practise, I make a few mistakes before I figure it out. Users will return to the enormous ocean of competition that Google search results represent if they do not find what they are looking for on a website.

Make sure your navigation is absolutely clear; if one user may make a mistake, so can a lot of others.

Typical issues

There are a slew of complications that can arise when information isn’t identified or comprehended by a search engine, all of which can work against you. Consider the following scenario:

• Orphaned content that can’t be found
• Content only available via site search
• Flash files, Java programs, audio files, video files
• AJAX* and flashy site effects
• Frames — Content embedded from another site can be problematic.
• Subdomains — content split into subdomains rather than sub-folders

* While Google has improved its ability to interpret AJAX pages, it is still easy to obscure content with unnecessary effects.

Make sure that key content is easily accessible, comprehensible, and integrated into the site’s general structure in a logical manner.

Summary 

If everything is done correctly, a human and a search engine should be able to figure out what a page is about before even looking at it. The standard SEO then builds on the solid foundation that your information architecture and site structure have laid down.