When it comes to building or redesigning a website, incorporating SEO (Search Engine Optimization) into the process is crucial for driving organic traffic and improving your online visibility. By considering key SEO factors from the outset, you can ensure that your website is designed to rank well on search engine result pages (SERPs) and attract relevant visitors. Let’s explore some essential elements to factor into your next website design or redesign, like the effect of hosting, CMS, mobile-friendliness, and more.

Hosting: Choosing a Trustworthy and Dedicated Service

Hosting is the service provided by a hosting company that will allow individuals and organizations to access your website through the internet by storing and delivering your website files and data. The name of the game is speed, people simply do not want to wait for a page to load more than 3 seconds  before they begin to leave. With user engagement becoming increasingly important to SEO, you should ensure that your hosting service can meet your website’s needs in the day-to-day, and in times of heavy demand. It is critical to choose a trustworthy provider, and larger companies may even consider establishing dedicated servers.

Content Management System (CMS): Find an SEO-Friendly Provider

When it comes to choosing a Content Management System for creating and publishing content, you can opt for an SEO-friendly platform, such as WordPress. SEO-focused CMS builders provide greater control over essential elements like page speed improvements, meta data, redirects, and sitemaps. With an SEO-friendly CMS, you can optimize your website's structure and content more effectively, and many SEO elements, such as sitemaps, will be generated and updated by the CMS.

Page Speed: Optimize Load Times

Page speed plays a significant role in user satisfaction and SEO rankings. Visitors expect websites to load quickly, and search engines consider page speed as a ranking factor, along with the user’s “dwell time” on a site before returning to other search results. To optimize your website's speed, avoid using unnecessary plugins and scripts that will bloat the webpage and cause it to load slower. Optimize image files by compressing them without compromising their quality, consider leveraging a fast server, and enable text compression techniques like GZIP to reduce the overall file size. All these principles apply to mobile sites as well, which have an increasing share of all internet traffic, with often less-than-ideal internet connections.

Crawlability: SEO-Friendly Site Structure

Crawlability is the measure of a website’s accessibility to bots that “crawl” through the webpage. Google Bot, for example, crawls through the internet, following links and building a searchable index of the web. To ensure search engines can easily navigate and index your website, build it in an SEO-friendly manner. Use HTML for content creation, as search engines can easily read and understand this text-based content. Avoid using technologies like Flash, iframes, and AJAX, as these may hinder search engine crawlers from accessing and processing your content. Broken redirects, dead links, and duplicate content can also have an adverse effect on crawlability and indexability.

Site Structure: How Users Navigate

It’s not just robots that need to navigate your site, but users too! A well-organized site structure not only improves user experience but also benefits SEO. Ensure that your website's pages are easily discoverable and accessible from the homepage. Utilize category folders and menus that align with logical keywords, making it easier for both users and search engines to understand your website's content. Avoid burying important pages deep within the site hierarchy, as search engines value websites with clear and concise structures that link back through themselves.

Mobile-Friendliness: Catering to Mobile-First Indexing

With the rise in mobile device usage, search engines are now prioritizing mobile-friendly websites over their desktop counterparts, so their SEO optimization is even more important. Ensure your website design is responsive and flexible and can adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes and devices. Implement a mobile-first approach to provide an excellent user experience for mobile users while improving your search engine rankings. More than 60% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices , with an upward trend expected to continue. While expandable content, such as drop-down menus, held a lower value in desktop versions of sites, the content on mobile sites is analyzed and indexed more holistically, focusing on user experience.

Image Files: Optimizing Images for SEO

Images not only enhance the visual appeal of your website but can also contribute to your site’s SEO ranking. Optimize images by providing descriptive "alt text," enabling search engines to understand their content through these text descriptions, the more specificity, the better. Naturally incorporate relevant keywords into the alt text to further boost SEO. These additions of “alt text” do not only serve to be read by the bots, but they also increase the accessibility of your webpage overall. For users who are visually impaired, their screen reading software will be able to describe what’s in your images through this text, or the page can display the text if the image cannot load. Again, optimizing image file sizes and types will minimize page load times too.

XML Sitemaps:

Including an XML sitemap on your website is like providing a table of contents to search engines. It helps search engine crawlers better understand the structure and content of your site. Ensure your XML sitemap includes all the important pages of your website, including images, videos, and other media files. Submitting your XML sitemap to search engines like Google helps them crawl and index your website more efficiently, ensuring that all your content is discovered and ranked appropriately. As mentioned before, many CMS providers can generate this sitemap automatically.

Trust Elements: Establishing Credibility and Trustworthiness

In addition to catering to search engines, it's essential to build trust with your website visitors. Including trust elements on your site helps establish credibility and encourages users to engage with your content, while potentially providing more hyperlinks. Some trust elements to consider include:

A. Reviews and Testimonials: Displaying genuine reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers or clients can build trust and provide social proof of your products or services.

B. Privacy Policies: Clearly stating your privacy policy helps visitors understand how their personal information is handled and is critical in building trust and establishing transparency.

C. About Us Page: An informative and well-crafted "About Us" page provides an opportunity to share your brand's story, mission, and values. It humanizes your website, giving visitors a glimpse into the people behind the business and fostering trust.

D. Links to Social Media Pages: Including links to your active social media profiles allows visitors to further engage with your brand and validates your online presence. It also provides an avenue for users to share your content, increasing visibility and credibility.

E. Copyright Year: Displaying the current copyright year in the footer of your website demonstrates that your content is up to date and maintained regularly. This small detail can positively impact the perception of your website's credibility.

When designing or redesigning your website, integrating SEO considerations from the start is essential for achieving better visibility, organic traffic, and search engine rankings. By focusing on hosting, CMS, crawlability, site structure, page speed, mobile-friendliness, image optimization, XML sitemaps, and trust elements, you can optimize your website's performance in search results and provide excellent user experience. Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, so regularly monitoring and adjusting these factors will help your website maintain a strong online presence. For further help with your sites SEO or your next web design project, contact Doukas Media today!