The Importance of SEO in Website Development

While building a website, people mainly focus on the design, the content, or the features they want in their website. However, people may overlook an important aspect of every website: Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is what makes your website visible on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and more. Having an SEO optimized website is important, if not then your website may look great, but users won’t be able to find it.

In this article, we’ll explore how SEO and website development are connected, and why it’s so important to consider SEO early in the process.

How SEO Influences Website Development

Many people make mistake in thinking that SEO is implemented after a website is built. SEO and website development goes hand-in-hand. The moment a website starts building SEO is supposed to be integrated into it.

When SEO is considered during the development phase, it can greatly improve the site’s ability to rank well in search engines.

Search engines like Google use bots (also known as crawlers or spiders) to visit websites and gather information about them. These bots then rank websites based on how relevant and useful they are for specific search queries.

A website developed with SEO in mind will be structured in a way that makes it easy for these bots to understand and index, which helps your site rank higher.

Advantages of SEO in Website Development

When SEO is integrated into the development process, your website becomes a powerful tool for attracting visitors. Let’s look at some of the positive impacts SEO can have on your website:

• Improved Organic Traffic: SEO helps your website appear in search results for relevant keywords, which drives organic (unpaid) traffic to your site. This means people searching for what you offer are more likely to find your website.
• Enhanced User Experience (UX): SEO focuses on creating a great user experience. This includes fast load times, easy navigation, and mobile-friendly design. When your site is easy to use and loads quickly, visitors are more likely to stay longer, explore your pages, and ultimately convert into customers.
• Easily Crawled by Bots: Websites designed with SEO in mind are easier for search engine bots to crawl and index. This makes it more likely that your website will be ranked higher in search results. Properly optimized websites also avoid technical issues that can block search engines from indexing certain pages.
• Higher Conversion Rates: SEO helps attract the right audience to your website. When your site is optimized for relevant keywords, the visitors you receive are more likely to be interested in your offerings. As a result, they’re more likely to take action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or contacting your business.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Unlike PPC in SEO website owner does not require to keep investing money to make the website stay on the SERP. SEO is a long-term strategy, when done properly it attracts customers for a longer period. This means you get more value from the marketing efforts.

10 Best Practices for SEO-Friendly Website Development

To ensure your website is SEO-friendly from the start, follow these best practices:

1. Mobile Optimized: Ensure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly, as search engines prioritize mobile-first indexing to cater to users on various devices.
2. Structured Data Markup: Implement structured data (schema markup) to help search engines better understand your content and improve the display of rich snippets, which enhances click-through rates.
3. Follow & No-follow Pages: Use follow links to pass SEO value to trusted pages and no-follow links to prevent passing value to less authoritative or irrelevant sites, maintaining a clean link profile.
4. Robots.txt File: Configure the robots.txt file to guide search engines on which pages to crawl or avoid, ensuring only valuable content is indexed.
5. Submitting Sitemap: Create and submit an XML sitemap to help search engines index all the critical pages of your website, improving its overall discoverability.
6. Correct Redirects: Use 301 redirects for permanent moves and 302 redirects for temporary changes, ensuring visitors and search engines reach the correct pages without harming your SEO.
7. Page Load Speed: Optimize website speed, as fast-loading pages are favoured by both users and search engines, improving user experience and rankings.
8. Image Optimization: Large image files can slow down your website, which negatively affects user experience and SEO. Using next-gen image formats and proper alternate texts are important.
9. Improper Use of JavaScript or Flash: Using too much JavaScript or Flash can cause issues for search engines trying to crawl your website. Make sure these elements are implemented carefully to avoid SEO problems.
10. Clean Code: Keep your website’s code clean and well-organized, reducing errors, improving loading times, and making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages.

Key SEO Elements to Focus on During Development

To create an SEO-friendly website, there are several important elements to focus on during development:

• Mobile Responsiveness: Since larger number of audiences who browse internet are mobile users, it is important to focus on mobile-optimized sites. To attract these users having a website that looks and works well on mobile is important.
• Page Speed Optimization: No one stays on a buffering website; users leave a website which takes longer to load and display data. This increases the bounce rate and negatively impacts SEO. Optimized images, minimal coding and utilizing the caching can highly improve site speed.
• URL Structure & Clean Code: Simple and descriptive URLs e.g., https://sovorun.com/services/website-development make it easier for both users and search engines to understand what your pages are about.
• On-Page SEO Elements: On-page SEO includes optimizing meta titles, descriptions, header tags (H1, H2, etc.), and alt text for images. These elements help search engines understand the content on each page and rank them accordingly. Adding internal links between your pages also improves site navigation and SEO.
• Structured Data Markup: Structured data (like Schema markup) helps search engines understand the content on your website better. This can lead to rich snippets (like review stars or product details) showing up in search results, which can increase your click-through rate.
• Technical SEO: This is something if ignored no matter what tactics are used in On-Page SEO website won’t be properly visible on the SERP. This contains pages to show on browser, claiming important webpages, blocking bots and more.

Having an agency that understand the importance of SEO in website development and can integrate it smoothly is beneficial. Explore this detailed blog that explains how to choose the right SEO agency for your business.

Disadvantages of Ignoring SEO in Website Development

If SEO is not considered during the development phase, it can cause several issues that negatively impact your website’s performance. Here are some common consequences:

• Poor Search Engine Ranking: SEO is like plating but for website users. When not done properly it won’t attract users and may not be shown in SERP.
• Decreased User Experience: Websites are made for the users in mind. If your site is slow, hard to navigate, or not mobile-friendly, users will leave quickly, increasing your bounce rate and harming your rankings.
• Lower Organic Traffic: Ignoring SEO means you won’t rank high for relevant keywords, so fewer people will find your website organically (without paid ads).
• Increased Dependency on Paid Advertising: Paid Ads are not bad unless that is not what your website traffic solely depends on. Proper SEO attracts organic traffic balancing marketing costs.
• High Bounce Rates: Poorly done SEO, no proper website structure, improper CTA’s encourages users to leave the site increasing the bounce rate affecting website traffic.

Is your website SEO-Friendly? Contact Sovorun to get your website audit and leverage our SEO services to boost your webpage ranking in search results!

Conclusion

Neglecting SEO will negatively affect your website. Build websites keeping SEO in mind from the time a website starts building to perform better in search results and reach targeted audience.

By following best practices of SEO and collaborating with SEO experts during development and after will not only make it look great but also optimize it to perform great by attracting visitors, engaging users, and growing online presence.