SEO and Web Design: How To Build Websites That Rank (2024)

Did you know that a user only takes 50 milliseconds to decide to browse the website further or leave it? This statistic shows the importance of good website design. However, web design is not just enough to rank your website on top of search engines in 2024, you also need to build an SEO-friendly website!

You may be doing everything right in your mind. You may have a good website interface, a perfect color scheme, the website could be very user-friendly, and other such factors. However, if your website still fails to rank, you neglect some very simple yet crucial SEO tips. 

Or if you produce high-quality search engine optimized content but your website lacks SEO-friendly code, a poor interface, and a sluggish loading speed–it definitely will drop the number of visitors and eventually no web ranking at all!

So, to stay on top of everyone on Google in 2024, you need to strike the perfect blend of web design and SEO!

In this article, we will review the critical SEO and web design tips you need to build a website that ranks high on SERPs. So, be prepared because your website will start ranking once you implement these tips. Make sure it can handle more and more traffic!

What Is SEO Web Design? 

It means SEO web design refers to designing and constructing a website in an SEO-friendly manner. This means incorporating all the necessary factors that are search engine optimized. So, you should employ SEO best practices such as high readability, mobile-friendliness, descriptive URLs, etc. 

But why do you need to deal with all this hassle? 

SEO web development is the only key to acquiring more traffic to your websites and ensuring more people can see them! If your website follows maximum SEO best practices, search engines are more likely to show it to consumers who search for products, services, etc., related to your business. 

This means increasingly more clients, greater traffic, and larger revenues!

10 Essential SEO and Web Design Tips To Build Websites That Rank 

To construct an effective website that ranks on search engines in 2024, make sure you know the SEO focus areas and design a website the right way Google loves ranking it! For this you need to incorporate critical web design SEO strategies into your website. 

These 10 guaranteed SEO and web design tips ensure that your website design and information structure create a solid SEO foundation. Furthermore, it helps search engines know what is going on on your website and immediately pull it up for clients after relevant searches. 

Don’t lag in 2024, implement the things rightly to have the optimized results timely this year! 

Have an SEO-Friendly and Clean Website Code

The first thing in building a website is the code. So, you need to write an SEO-friendly website code that helps you rank on SERPs. 

Beware of flash sites. Although flash sites look neat, they are quite difficult to optimize SEO-wise. As such, they have poor chances of being ranked. So, the simple rule is to avoid creating flash sites to get ranked.

Although, what code options are left then?

You will not find a wide variety of code options to implement the different design factors of a website. However, most designers stick to HTML or CSS. These codes are a great choice, optimizable, and SEO-friendly so they will help your website get ranked!  

Ensure a Mobile-Friendly and Responsive Web Design

A mobile-friendly website is among the most crucial web design best practices in 2024. It’s because the first interaction of the user on a website is extremely likely to occur over the mobile phone in most cases!

Moreover, the Search engines scrutinize the mobile version of a site to rank it for mobile searches. This means your website should retain its essence and quality in multi-device interactions. 

Besides the mobile-friendly website, responsive web design is another crucial factor that plays a crucial role in ranking of the website. 

Whether the screen gets bigger or smaller, the interface of your website should adapt smoothly, the information should be readable, the options should work flawlessly, and the website should be extremely responsive! 

Construct a Clear URL

Constructing a clear web URL or URL for different pages is not the top step, however a crucial one.

Imagine a URL: www.xyz.com/blogs/how-to-xyz/

Now, imagine another one: www.xyz.com/sc7e/sc7e-123s/

While the first URL makes sense and depicts a clear path from the website to its blogs and the specific blog opened, the other is completely incoherent and senseless. It provides no information to users nor to the search engines. 

Having URLs that make sense to both the users and the search engines will work in your favor. This improves the users’ experience on your website and ensures the search engine can map the path to various pages on your site efficiently and rank it in a better spot!

The more context your URLs provide to the users and search engines, the better the user experience and SEO will be for your website. 

Website & Information Structure

The information on your website should be cohesive and well-organized. If everything seems all over the place, no matter how readable, users will struggle to engage, and your website will not be ranked. 

Remember, the stakeholders concerned here are humans, robots, and AI. Your website’s information structure is analyzed by SEO search engines (AI and other programs) to be ranked. You will get a poor ranking if they detect madness in your structure. 

Structure your information so that it is understandable. Organize it into sections, topics, and pages on your website. Moreover, make sure to strike a balance across all pages; do not play around with extremes like too-wordy pages and pages with barely any text. 

Optimal Page Speed Could Be a Game Changer

In today’s fast-paced world, patience is not a virtue most people have. Everyone wants everything instantly. So, if the pages of your website take slightly too long to load, there goes a potential customer.

Hence, optimal page speed should be a top priority when designing the website. The users should have a smooth experience navigating through various site pages instead of growing white hairs waiting for one to load. 

You can use different tests and tools to assess the page speed of your website on the mobile and desktop versions. Many such tools also provide apt solutions to speed increase if it is slow. 

Ensure Smooth Navigation

Navigation is a key influencer of user experience. The simpler and easier it is to browse the website, the better users will like it. Hence, strictly avoid complicating the website pages for fancier elements. Keeping it simple is the key.

A responsive web design SEO is beloved not just by users but by search engines, too. This means a smoother navigation experience will increase the ranking of your website. 

The easier it is to navigate the site, the less confused users will be. Hence, the less likely they will be to leave the site. Instead, they will want to explore and engage more, increasing their chances of converting to a loyal and regular client.

Increase Information Readability

This is especially important when we are looking at multi-device interactions. Reading the text should not be difficult whether the user is browsing the website on their mobile phone or a desktop. 

Blurred text or too small alphabets will only get your website in trouble. 

Web designers tend to focus more on the obvious and non-text elements of the website. However, it is useless if they cannot get any information after attracting the user to the website. 

Hence, readability is necessary for an SEO-friendly web design. This means choosing the right font, maintaining the right font size for headings and texts respectively, and maintaining it across screen sizes. Moreover, the color scheme with respect to the font must also be assessed. Ensure the text gets highlighted against your chosen color scheme so users don’t struggle to read it. 

Enhanced Search Engine Crawling 

Search engine-friendly design also means that search engines should be able to crawl and access your website easily. This process provides the search engine with information such as what your business does, how it does it, and where. 

The more information a search engine can extract, the more likely it is to show your website to users with related queries. 

The text of your web design and SEO is the key here. Make sure the relevant services and information are written out clearly and in a readable fashion. Indexing is your best friend in this regard. 

To strongly index your content, make sure to include internal links to other pages and options beyond the home page. This allows the search engine to thoroughly navigate your website and present it to users at higher ranks. 

File Sizes Should be Optimized

Yes, high-quality and high-resolution images are the most attractive. However, if they come at the cost of slow speed and lags, you should re-evaluate your priorities. 

Large file sizes are associated with longer page loading times. This means users would have to wait too long between navigating pages and likely leave the site without engaging. This would further damage your ranking. 

Hence, using as small a file size as possible for your images and other heavy elements on the site is best. That does not mean you should completely degrade its quality, just optimize it. 

Solid Keyword Targeting

Modern website optimization is all about incorporating and targeting the right keywords. Search engines rank websites based on the relevant keywords found on their website pages. 

Keywords can be broad and more focused search terms that users enter into search engines. The more efficiently your website content uses them, the more likely a search engine is to produce your website for the user. 

The better structured your website is, the more refined your keyword targeting strategy will be. The first page could deal with the broader keywords that become more focussed deeper into the website. 

The key is to do rigorous research on related and relevant keywords. Next, you determine how to disperse the keywords across your website’s content efficiently. 

 Avoid Problems that Hinder SEO Optimization

The key to a perfect web design and SEO is not just adopting and implementing the SEO best practices. It also lies in letting go of the problematic practices that endanger your website’s ranking in the future.

While you may feel you’ve built a perfect aesthetic website, it is hindering progress, it surely may have issues. For instance, if it lacks page navigation issues, content duplication, or any other implementation of inappropriate SEO strategies that are against Google guidelines, your site will be penalized.

Search engines flag several potential issues as they review your website or are incomprehensible for the search engines. Resulting in the search engine reducing your website’s overall ranking.

A few things to avoid at all costs that will halt your web ranking in 2024 include:

• Content that cannot be found or accessed on the site. 
• Duplicated content with no originality. 
• Flash files on the site that are not seo-optimized. 
• Audio, design, visual, and other files that are too large.
• Embedding content from another site can cause problems. 
• Splitting the content into sub-domains rather than sub-folders.

Conclusion  

Ranking on Google is not just about implementing SEO strategies or publishing authentic and original content. But, to rank in 2024, you have to implement the synergy of SEO and web design. 

You should build a website that has a perfect balance of web design and SEO. This would help search engines crawl your website, ensure everything is search engine optimized, and rank it on top SERPs. 

If you’re planning to build a website from scratch in 2024 and don’t know how to write search engine-friendly code. No worries! At Canadian Digital Consulting Agency, we have a team of professional web developers who can help you! 

Even if you want to optimize your website design for SEO, our professional web designers and SEO experts will optimize your site according to the latest web designs in 2024. So, rethink right now, and bring the change to lead in 2024!