How To Design Your Website For SEO In 2020

Search engine optimization is a key consideration for any business launching a website today. Without SEO, you will be doomed to obscurity and never reach those coveted top spots in the SERPs. Fortunately, if you design your website with SEO in mind from the very beginning, you will find it much easier to maintain.

Make Sure Your Navigation Is Fluid

There are a number of different factors that Google considers when determining an SEO score for your website. It used to be that the only thing that really mattered was the keywords that you used, but this has not been the case for some time. Today, if you want to design a website with SEO in mind, you need to consider human users more than search engine bots. That means that your website needs to be easy to navigate for people, and users should not find it confusing to use.

Fluid navigation can be quite tricky to get right, especially for larger websites with a labyrinthine structure. However, while developing an effective navigation system might take some time, it is well worth the investment.

Use Search Friendly URLs

Your URLs are one place where it is more useful to think about the search engine than the user. You want your URLs to be as search-friendly as possible, which means avoiding things like query strings. In fact, the best URLs for search engines are those that utilize keywords that convey what the content of the page is.  If you hire a professional web designer to build your business website, they will be able to handle the URL structure for you.

If you are using a content management system that automatically generates URLs for you, make sure that you are checking them manually to ensure that they are optimized for search engines. If your URL is not optimized for SEO, you are missing a very simple trick for significantly improving your online visibility.

Tell Crawlers To Ignore Pages That You Don’t Want Indexed

If there are pages on your website that you would prefer search engine bots to ignore, you can easily tell them to do so. Examples of pages that you might not want a search engine to index include those that add no value to your content, such as pages that contain server-side script. Alternatively, there may be pages on your website that you are using to test out new designs and features, and which you do not want the general public stumbling upon just yet.

In order to prevent crawler bots from accessing specific pages on your website, all you need to do is update your robots.txt file. You can also password-protect sensitive areas of your website, and those that you are using as testing environments. There is also a local web development environment you can use to test new features before launch.

Regularly Post New Content

One of the simplest ways of improving your search engine optimisation in the long term is to keep adding high-quality content to your website on a regular basis. Regularly posting new content is important for letting both visitors to your website and search engines know that you are still active.

If you don’t keep tending to your website SEO, your score can quickly slip, and with it your position in the results pages. The best way of ensuring that your SEO remains as high as possible is to design your website with SEO in mind from the very beginning.