Arabnet Arabnet

Prior to 2009, the more links websites had the higher they ranked in the SERPs, no matter how bad their structure was, the average time spent per page, or how the pages were linked together. Today, this equation has been rebalanced; now all that matters is how the website’s design increases user engagement.

What most companies are currently doing is this: they collect information from clients, forward it to project managers, who in turn assign it to a web designer before passing it to the web development team for final execution. Once all the things are done, an SEO expert gets notified to overlook the project.

More often than not, SEOs are either not allowed to make any changes to the design or if they are allowed, they first need to get the changes approved by the client, contact the designer, and then get things done with the developer. Needless to say, this process is time consuming, and can be streamlined by making some adjustments at the design level.

If you are wondering how to make SEO-friendly websites easier to  develop, here are some worthy tips based on my experience as an SEO consultant. 

1) Involve SEOs in the design of the website wireframe 

Designers generally begin their work by making a list of websites whose design appeals to their clients. They match the web colors with the logo and design the websites according to the text provided by the client. The end result is often really attractive: you have a clean design, readable font, amazing use of colors and graphics, and everything is well arranged. 

But, that is not enough to make the website beat competition. You should make sure that the usage of colors catches the eyes to convert visitors, that everything is well arranged to appear in search engines, and so on. The designer is not responsible to think of all these things. It is the job of the SEO expert, whose first and foremost task is to ensure better user and search experience. Hence, it a clever move is to involve SEOs early on in the website development, right from the moment the designer begins working on the wireframe. 

2) SEOs are the ideal candidates to conduct the research on competitors

Ask the SEO expert to conduct a SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) to better analyze your competition, and thus, make the necessary implementations to your new website. The SWOT analysis will help you understand: 

• how to stand out from the competition
• how to build better landing pages
• how to distribute the web pages
• how to define call-to-actions
• what things engage the users

Caution: You will need to perform A/B Testing - nothing can be done perfect in the first time, but implementing something new in the first round will definitely make some impact. Then you can improve it through A/B testing.

3) Let the designers add their creativity touch

After hearing the recommendations of the SEOs, it’s now the designers turn to do their job. For instance, one recommendation is to put a local touch to the website to make it look familiar to the potential users and more trustworthy. The designer might choose to implement this by adding a famous location picture into the background, or use a word that is most commonly used between the citizens or localize the design of the buttons.

Remember, it’s always a good idea to have the team share some ideas, but let the designers do the job; they understand the color scheme and how to make attractive designs. 

4) Before the website goes live, make sure you have everything checked

Here is the list of things that needs to be checked before going live:

• Proper page URLs
• Proper images name
• Quick loading (it is good to show the client as well) 
• Original content
• Schema implementation
• Proper canonical implementation

Tip: you can also restrict the robots in Robots.txt to crawl the website if the SEO recommendations are implemented properly.

***********

More about Kumail Hemani

Kumail Hemani is an SEO Consultant works at Globus, a Dubai based company that offers IT and web services to the UAE.