In a competitive environment having a website is no longer enough. What businesses need today is a growing online presence that is only possible by combining the web development and online marketing functions. Among the various online marketing channels, SEO is perhaps the only way to continue to get visitors even when you pause or stop efforts.
Also, among all the marketing channels, SEO is the channel that can actually help you build a better website and play an active role in the design of your website. This article explains the role SEO can play in the design of your website.
Every edge you can get over your competitors is crucial in today’s business environment. Most companies think of SEO almost as an afterthought. As a result, most websites are built on a foundation that isn’t always suited to scaling up the site’s SEO seamlessly. It also leaves gaps in technical SEO compliance that are often seen as too expensive to justify the effort needed to fix them. If you integrate SEO in your website planning, design and development, you will have built a website that search engine crawlers find easy to crawl, index. An error-free SEO compliant website sends the right signals to search engines about the attention to detail through a compliance to search engine guidelines.
Once you have the foundation of an SEO compliant website design, any enhancement you do to the site’s content and linking will have a more of an impact on your rankings than if your website didn’t have an SEO compliant design.
SEO and its Role in Web Design
More and more companies are beginning to realize the importance of the role SEO can play in the design and development of their website. SEO and web design must go hand in hand. At Flying Cow Design, we often incorporate SEO in the web design process of our clients’ websites. However, many companies do not understand the importance of the role SEO plays in your website design, and ignore the value SEO could bring to their website while in the designing stages. The value of SEO in web design manifests itself in many ways:
SEO helps you select search friendly technologies
It becomes easier to get traffic to the site if it has an SEO friendly web design. For example, many technologies make a site look “cool” but are not search engine friendly. A website that uses such technologies to wow visitors may either be blocking or slowing down a search engine when it tries to access the content on the site.
SEO compliant folder structure and URLs matter
While designing a website, many web developers do not realize the importance of URL structure and keywords in the URL. When people link to a page in your website, most link to the URL of the page. If there is a keyword present in the URL, then they keyword also becomes a part of the linking text. In turn, it helps the page rank better for that keyword. Like this, SEO can also help you optimize various aspects of site architecture, navigation, flow and URL structure of your website.
SEO helps you create visitor as well as search friendly content
Before any website is design and developed, the web design team needs to get a good understanding of what the website is all about, who the target audience is and what that audience is likely to search for. Once the design team determines this, SEO can help the team select keywords that the target audience may search for. Optimizing the content of a page is no longer about stuffing keywords in the content. Good website content not only has the right number of keywords on the page meaningfully, it also has natural variations of the keywords and other related terms. Search engines recognize this and look for content that has a good mix of keyword density, keyword proximity and keyword variations. SEO can help you create such content. It is always less expensive to get the content optimized as it is created as part of the website design process than to redo the content for SEO compliance after the site is built.
SEO is as important to creating a website as the site’s design and content. SEO compliant website design and coding creates a platform that allows you to identify and fix problem areas while the website is being designed. SEO can help you design a website that loads quickly, looks good, has visitor and search friendly content and more. If the website is designed keeping SEO in mind, then pages from your website can start ranking almost immediately after they go live. Including SEO in the design stages of your website will ensure that you do not need to undo a lot to achieve technical SEO compliance.
SEO and Web Design Services from Flying Cow Design
As a web design firm, we realized very early that website design without SEO compliance is incomplete. We have both encouraged our clients to start SEO early in the website development phase and have worked with them closely to build websites that rank well in search results and deliver visitors and results to our clients. When you need a website that will improve your online presence, talk to us about our internet marketing services.
CEO, Flying Cow Design
Attended University of Auckland
Lives in San Francisco Bay Area
