- As any seasoned pro will admit,
building an SEO-friendly site is not easy.
It's okay to admit that,
let's do it here and let's move on.
They might follow SEO best practices
including fast load times, mobile-friendly experience
and descriptive URLs,
however, coming up with a solid plan
and a structured approach
for representing the services you offer your customers,
y'all, it can be daunting.
- Don't worry, this is a safe space
but our first item on the checklist
is have a responsive web design.
Mobile users are more likely to leave a site
if it is not responsive.
When users spend less time on a page,
it will lead to a higher bounce rate.
And on the other hand,
when users spend more time on a website, it's good for SEO.
Google's mobile-friendly tests,
will help check whether your mobile site is optimized
for mobile devices.
Also, WordPress and many other platforms
allow you to view your site on different devices too.
- That's right Nealey,
I've shared that Google's mobile-friendly test
on some of the webinars I've done
and people have been jazzed to use it,
it's super convenient.
Moving on, let's talk about how
to make navigation search engine friendly.
Navigation is another vital element of web design
and you got the site structure, URLs, XML sitemaps
and other components, which need to provide more information
about what each of the pages is all about.
And navigation is more than having a menu
at the top of a site.
It is how you direct users and search engines
to the most relevant content on a site.
And if search engines and users
can't understand content easily,
the chances are the site is unlikely to rank
on top ranking results, which is no bueno
and the catch is to ensure that search engines and users
can easily discover and understand important content.
- And images play a critical role in web design
but if the images aren't optimized
for search engines, they may work against SEO.
PHP forms a vital part of SEO
and will determine whether a website will rank higher
on Google or not.
And that's why Google came up with Core Web Vitals
that help determine where to rank a website
on search result pages
and as such, ensure to include file names on images
and keep the file sizes as small as possible.
This way search engines will understand images
and those images won't take forever to load.
I recommend tinypng.com to optimize your images,
it's a free service
and I probably use it with most of my sites.
- And don't ignore image ALT attributes.
Ensuring that images load faster, is only the beginning.
You also need to include ALT attributes
to be 100% W3C compliant.
However, this doesn't involve adding any text
to your images, ALT attributes need to be relevant
and accurate and ALT attributes help search engines
like Google, understand images
to determine whether they are relevant to a search query
and they're also helpful for users who cannot see images.
- And then you wanna make sure
that the content you create is crawlable by search engines.
Creating informative and and unique content is one thing,
ensuring that users can actually locate content
on the webpage, is a totally different thing.
This is where the term crawlable comes in.
In other words, can search engine spiders discover
and fetch every link within a website?
Can it?
But Web crawling bots are programs used by search engines
to locate and revisit content on webpages
to determine how many pages of these sites are crawlable.
If a bot cannot follow a link,
it will not be found in the search results.
- Now, I encourage you to think
about designing search-friendly URLs.
Search-friendly URLs are good for search engine optimization
and user experience
and more specifically, well optimized URLs meet the needs
of searchers and users
and URLs are among the most important factors
that search engines use to rank a page on search results.
In fact, URLs describe a webpage
to potential visitors and search engines.
I mean, just think about it in your own journey today
and when you're on Google.
And as such, they need to be accurate
and well structured to describe your page appropriately.
- Next you wanna update website content.
A website is unlikely to have good SEO,
if it contains stale content.
That's why we recommend updating content on a website
from time to time.
More so, keeping content fresh
will help produce bounce rate,
which can otherwise hurt SEO.
Updating a website regularly
is critical when it comes to SEO.
I mean, for instance, leaving a huge gap between posts,
will make the website less credible.
Besides, checking a website more often
will help stay on top of things like broken links.
Users and search engines
wanna see content changing regularly.
Content will be more crawlable by search engines
and more valuable to users.
- As you can see, SEO and web design work hand in hand,
just like Nealey and myself.
And for web designers and developers,
it's not something to be ignored
even if your skillset is more specialized in other areas.
So gather resources, including this checklist,
to brush up on your knowledge
and make sure you're covering the key areas
for yourself and your clients.
All right, that's a wrap
but your journey doesn't have to end here,
we have over 300 videos for you to watch.
- So be sure to like, comment and subscribe,
thanks for watching.
This is The Journey.