Website design and SEO are intrinsically linked

It is important to plan your SEO strategy before the website design because SEO can impact the structure and design of your website. Here are a few reasons why it is important to consider SEO before starting the design process:

SEO-friendly structure: The structure of your website can affect its SEO performance. For example, a well-organized website with a clear hierarchy and easy-to-follow navigation will be more easily crawled and indexed by search engines, which can improve its ranking. On the other hand, a poorly structured website can be more difficult for search engines to understand and may not rank as well.
Keyword research: Before designing your website, it is important to do keyword research to understand what terms and phrases your target audience is searching for. This will help you create content that is relevant and useful to your audience, which can improve your website’s ranking in search results.
Content organization: The organization of your website’s content can also impact its SEO. By organizing your content into categories and subcategories, you can make it easier for search engines to understand the topics and themes of your website, which can improve its ranking.
On-page optimization: There are many on-page optimization techniques that can improve the SEO of your website, such as using header tags, alt tags for images, and proper use of meta tags. By considering these techniques during the design process, you can ensure that your website is optimized for search engines from the start.

Overall, it is important to plan your SEO strategy before the website design because doing so can help you create a well-structured, keyword-rich, and optimized website that performs well in search results.

Important SEO aspects to consider during the SEO friendly website design process

1. Website Architecture

Integrating SEO into website design is critical as the site map, wireframes and overall structure is laid out to boost your SEO success. The keywords in menus, links, title text and any other text on the website will significantly impact whether or not search engines find you when a potential customer types in their query for your product or service.

This is why SEO is important from the very beginning; site architecture is the framework for your entire website and if you have to go in and change it later, it can cost a lot of extra time, money and customers who went elsewhere because Google didn’t find you the first time.

2. URL Structure

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. URLs are the locations or addresses for individual pieces of content (pages) on the web. URL naming and format can impact click-through rates. Not only do searchers use them to make decisions about which web pages to click on, but URLs are also used by search engines in evaluating and ranking pages. (read more on Moz)

If you didn’t think through your URL structure during the website design process you will have to reorganize and rename some if not all of your pages that can cost a lot of extra time, money.

summary

SEO and website design go hand in hand. Competition research, keyword research, a well-structured website, it’s load speed, navigation, the number of web pages are all important aspects to consider during the website design and redesign process. Sites designed without SEO in mind can cause ranking issues down the line.