Most people think of SEO and web development as two very different concepts that rarely intersect with each other. While they are different, they are actually much more connected than most people think. Beyond those keyword-optimized web pages and blog posts, SEO is a lot more involved behind the scenes. Let’s explore how SEO and web development influence each other in order to create a website that works.
Building a Sitemap
A sitemap, as the name suggests, is basically a map of your website where it lists all the important pages and their contents. The sitemap basically defines the relationship between the contents and the pages, giving you one cohesive map of all the places on your website.
The purpose of a sitemap is so that search engine bots can crawl your website and index web pages properly. Basically, it helps the bots find all the essential information and pages on your site. Once the bots have successfully indexed your site, you’re more likely to appear on the Google search results page.
Site Structure and Internal Linking
Websites with intuitive navigation are few and far between, but it’s easily one of the best things you could ever do when designing a website. The fact that you didn’t have to labor through pages and pages to find what you need is an accomplishment in and of itself. When your site works that way, you’re actually doing your SEO a favor as it affects the user experience of anyone who tries to visit your site. Yes, user experience matters a lot nowadays, especially when any slight inconvenience will immediately result in your visitors leaving your site and moving on to your competitors.
It’s crucial to have an excellent internal linking strategy to help users find what they need and also help search engines crawl your website easily. Every page needs to be linked somewhere and connected to multiple pages and not buried in a single page where it will remain lost and forgotten.
Responsive Design
Nowadays, websites not designed to be mobile-friendly can be quite an eyesore to many users. Not only that, but it also doesn’t help your site get indexed by search engines. Google has made it a priority to index mobile-friendly pages with responsive designs. Otherwise, you could potentially hurt your search engine ranking if you still don’t optimize your site for mobile users.
In addition, responsive design for websites doesn’t dilute your link equity. In fact, having a single URL for both your mobile site and its desktop version means that it will be much easier to increase your external backlink count on each page, giving you a boost in your SEO.
Website Speed
In the digital world, speed is everything. If you want to get better search engine rankings and more people to visit your website, you have to make sure that your site’s loading times are as fast as possible. This depends a lot on how your website is designed and how much bandwidth it takes to load every page.
A lot of websites suffer from slow loading times because of the way it was designed or because the hosting provider couldn’t handle all the traffic. The former is easier to resolve by just tweaking your website and removing any unnecessary graphics, content, and plugins.
Conclusion
Beyond content, SEO works most of its magic under the hood, where it intersects with many web development and design elements. If you really want to optimize your website to its fullest potential, you have to consider how it impacts SEO and your visitor’s user experience.
The Fancy Robot helps businesses and individuals transform their digital presence and make them stand out among their competitors. Through quality SEO, web design, and development, we help you build a professional website optimized to increase your ranking and revenue. Start your digital journey now through our SEO and web development services. Contact us today to get started.
