The entire look and feel of a website depends on the quality of its design elements. A fast and responsive website is more appealing to users compared to slow and shabby ones. But did you know that the quality of web design also has a direct relation with SEO outcomes?

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The combination of design elements used on a page impact its usability. It’s coding, style elements, navigational features and responsiveness are all important determinants of user experience. Potential customers who visit your website and find a hard-to-navigate clunky mess may never come back. 

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But many businesses who have reasonably good web design still fail to generate leads? It is because they should consider design from an SEO point of view. Websites must be constructed or modified considering the requirements of search engine optimisation. 

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SEO web design revolves around certain guidelines that are not that difficult to comprehend. Making a few design tweaks can result in massive improvements to your design. Business websites can show up higher in the rankings as better design translates to improved user experience. Read on to get a better idea about some innovative SEO-friendly web design tips. 

 

Advanced SEO Web Design Tips 

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1. Keep HTML section free of scripts - Keeping CSS and JavaScript code out of the HTML part of a page makes crawling easier. This is something to keep in mind during the website design phase. Any scripting added to the HTML section obstructs fast crawling and has a definite negative impact on SEO. It is recommended to keep the HTML part as clean as possible to make things easy for crawlers. Doing so makes your website a contender for the top search ranking spots.

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2. Optimise your page URLs for SEO - The URLs of each page on your website should be search friendly. It is ideal to use URLs that contain the focus keyword of the page i.e. the keyword that aptly describes the page’s content. This also increases the probability of the page getting crawled fast. Site owners should opt for content management systems (CMS) that offer the option of custom URLs. Your digital marketing efforts will also produce better results.

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3. Create relevant image alt attributes - Image alt text tags are a major aspect of optimising the design of web pages. They become very necessary in situations where your page fails to load images. More importantly, search engine algorithms consider image alt attributes for ensuring the keyword relevancy of a page. Optimising alt tags may also help your site’s images reach the top of Google Images.

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4. Keep your page content current - Working with stale and unchanged web page content is not recommended for websites that desire better rankings. Site owners might feel that their existing content works great, and prefer not to revise the full page. However, making a few alterations to relevantise your content might be all you need. If you run a regularly updated blog site, try to include relevant content excerpts from its latest posts into your service pages. SEO content writing experts can be relied upon for creating fresh and dynamic content. Updating content periodically raises the chances of pages being crawled.

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5. Have search engine friendly navigation - Using Flash-based search navigation can often be harmful to the crawlability of a website. Flash makes it difficult for your web pages to be crawled and indexed by most search engines. The natural alternative is using JavaScript and CSS code for creating navigational elements. Doing so raises the chance of your web pages ranking higher. Moreover, CSS and JavaScript offer ample options for creating stylish navigation features.

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6. Present content in a search-friendly manner - The content on your web pages should be laid out in a structured and organised manner. SEO web design should be focussed on streamlined content sectioning on a page. It involves placing headings at the right places, keeping paragraphs proportionate, and using links in a non-spammy manner. One must also avoid having very little content can also work against your ranking aspirations.

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7. Put away pages that are not to be crawled - Your website might have several pages that do not need to be indexed at all. It does not mean that they should not exist. Testing pages and others that do not need visitors can be kept away from robots. Search engines prefer to crawl and index pages that are useful to visitors. Unnecessary extra pages can hurt your rankings. A robots.txt file can be created to include only the pages you want to be crawled.

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8. Focus on optimising header tags use - Relevant and optimised heading tags on your page improves its structural appearance. Most search engine crawlers assign a greater amount of importance to header tags compared to the other elements. Headers with the focus keywords signify what the content under it is about. Using a good header structure on your pages make their design more SEO-friendly.

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9. Be compliant with W3C design standards - W3C or World Wide Web Consortium Standards are widely considered as the benchmarks for design, coding and compatibility. The main motive of considering this standard is ascertaining that your code is clean. SEO web design as a whole is centred around offering clean and simple code to the crawlers. W3C-compliant design raises a website’s credibility.

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10. Metadata for each page must be unique - Using the same metadata for different pages is a mistake that must be avoided. Each page on a website should have unique titles, keywords, headings and descriptions. This is quite vital if one is targeting higher ranks on search engine result pages. Unique metadata aids crawlers in getting a clear idea regarding how a site is set up. 
 

The SEO web design tips mentioned above can be implemented by all online businesses. Utilising these can make a great difference for your site’s rankings. Approach web design professionals with updated SEO-friendly design knowledge if you are constructing a new website for your business.

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