Five Ways to Integrate SEO with your Design

SEO is often thought of by site owners as something that gets done after the website is designed. Optimization is something that should be considered during the earliest planning stages. Some designers focus on SEO strategy in every single aspect of the website. Integrating SEO into your web design is necessary to achieve ranking in the search engine results.

1. Create clean code

Clean code is important in incorporating SEO into your web design. If the quality code is planned out really well, there will be less of a need for the structure to be reevaluated later. The technical aspect of coding the SEO elements into the design structure is arguably one of the most important tasks in developing a new website. Google and other search engine spiders look heavily at your internal link structure. It is the sole “road” they have to dive deeper and index the lower-tier pages in your site, so ensuring that you have solid connections throughout is a must.

2. Make each page unique

Creating unique pages improves SEO integration capabilities. Making sure that there are as few redundancies as possible within the site will improve the site’s performance in the search engines. Pages within a site perform better when there is more unique content, with a low amount of keyword density (2-4%). You can also spruce up these pages by adding “rich media” such as relevant images and videos.

 

3. Build a careful link portfolio

Link flow is another aspect of design that affects optimization. Striking a careful balance between inbound and outbound links will improve the site’s ability to rank properly. A problematic link flow compromises the performance of the website. Experts must frequently test and evaluate the link flow throughout the site and reevaluate it regularly. An excessive number of outbound links on a page makes it that much harder to rank. Directing the links toward the strongest content that supports the terms being targeted with accuracy will improve search engine results.

4. Use keywords in moderation

The appropriate use of keywords and key phrases should be incorporated into the titles and body of your site copy. This may mean working with a search engine optimization team to make sure that the content is grouped and classified in a way that supports the search engine marketing and optimization efforts. The titles, tags and content should be properly aligned with those objectives.

5. Create a sitemap

Sitemaps cue the search engines to crawl the website. The better the sitemap, the more crawling activity the website can achieve. HTML, XML or Google sitemaps can all benefit the website. The descriptive content, categorization of content, and anchor text must all work together to support the optimization objectives for the website.

Optimization can no longer be treated as an afterthought when it comes to design. It must now be a consideration in the developmental stages. The entire site has to be designed with search engine performance in mind.