Websites need to address two set of entities perfectly – consumers and search engines. While creating a user-friendly and impressive website is a fundamental aspect, making it SEO friendly ensures that search engines crawlers are able to index the site and its webpages in the most efficient manner. While an attractive and well-designed website is central to the success of an online business, SEO services make it search-engine friendly that helps with higher ranking of the website on the search engine pages. It is a well-known fact that of all the people who use search engines every day to look for products and services online, only a negligible percentage (only about 5%) go beyond the first page of search engine page results. So, if traction and footfall is what the website is looking to garner, the best thing to do is to find that perfect balance between an optimized SEO-friendly site and one that is aesthetically beautiful.

Here are some of the best practices that web designers and developers need to keep in mind –

Focus on the navigational properties of the site to be crawler friendly.

Designers and developers need to work upon the navigation so that the site is not only user-friendly but also easy for the search engine to find and index. They need to ensure that there are more sub-category pages and extensive navigation available under each category where each sub-category page targets specific keywords so as to reach the highest ranking. When the idea is to make the site easily accessible and visible, it is essential to focus on navigation best practises that enhances user experience. Presenting the content in a hierarchical manner and using inter-linking pages to facilitate the traffic to move from one page to another are some of the desirable practises here.

Focus on the content of the website

One of the basic and yet the most important things for designers and developers to do is to concentrate a lot on the structure and the design. What is highly important is that the laid-down rules are given due importance while designing a site. For example, an image with text overlap will not be comprehended as content by a search engine until and unless the text is in the HTML code. It is important to not only understand the rules well, teams need to interpret them properly so that the placement of the content is not in conflict with user experience or the design and layout of the site while enhancing the site’s optimized crawling potential. 

Create content that can be crawled and indexed well by the search engine

At the end, you would want your site to be easily crawled by a search engine and understand the content of the site for it to rank high in the SERP. Keep the content in the HTML text format, especially for Google. With most developers and designers, the issue is about choosing between HTML and JavaScript. While the former is what the Google search engine adores, JavaScript comes with plenty of functionalities that make the site look better and impressive. But, at the same time, JavaScript is not easily deciphered by Google and the crawler takes more time and resources to understand the content. This is a challenge that the development team needs to decide keeping in mind that the end user experience that they want to deliver vis-à-vis loading time and crawlability of the search engine.

Use of Images

32% marketers in 2018 felt that visual images are impressive content for their sites with only 27% saying that blogs are the most important for their sites. The truth is that images can do wonders to a site in terms of aesthetics and also enhance visibility for the search engines. But there are best practises here too – high-quality images, uploading the right picture type, using pictures that load fast, maintain consistency in terms of the size and style of the pictures being used, name pictures appropriately to attract search engines, fill up the Alt Text for describing the image, naming tags appropriately are all methods that helps improve the visibility of the site, both for the crawler as well the end-user.

it is essential to keep posting fresh content, from time to time

It is true that search engines love sites and pages that have fresh content. Hence, administrators of top-ranking sites believe in changing and updating the information and content available on their homepage and category pages quite regularly. The rule of the thumb says that a site that is updated at least twice or thrice a week has more chances of being noticed by a search engine compared to a site where the content is changed less frequently. But beware, unnecessary additions that happen every hour is something that the crawler will ignore. Keep and maintain the right balance here to make your site more attractive for search engines crawlers.