Why You Need SEO During Website Development and Design

When you’re starting a new site, you need to imagine you’re building a house. What this means is you need to develop strong foundations… If you don’t, you’re setting your website up to fail.

Think about it, if you build your house on sand, it will sink.

And that’s what happens to your website when you don’t think about the basic SEO practices when you’re in the website development stage.

It’s crazy how many people ignore SEO when they’re building their site, and it’s a costly mistake.

Put it this way; it doesn’t matter how comely your site is. If you ignore the basics, your site will fail. There are five reasons you should be implementing SEO when you’re building your site:

• It helps develop better rankings
• Saves time having to redevelop your site
• Saves you money
• Increases your traffic volume
• Makes you a lot more money

This can be accomplished if you think about SEO while building your site. But, what specific factors do you need to think about in the development stages of building your site:

How Internal Linking & Site Architures Helps

Your website has many moving parts that all need to work together if you want to succeed.

In basic terms, your website needs to be laid out in the most logical manner possible. But how does internal linking and site architecture help?

A well-structured website with plenty of internal links does two things:

• Makes it easier for your users to navigate
• Helps Google crawl your pages

And if you want to succeed with your efforts, this is a crucial thing to think about.

The easier you make it for Google to crawl your pages, the more likely they are of placing you in a higher position.

When you’re optimizing your site architecture, there’s a general rule of thumb:

All your website pages should be no more than three clicks for the homepage. Making it as straightforward as possible for Google and your users.

Internal links are what helps your users navigate your website and find new content. But that’s not all they do.

Internal links help you spread link juice, which helps other pages feed off the more powerful pages on your site.

Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile Friendly

Did you know that 60% of all internet searches are made from a mobile phone? For that reason alone, you should realize why it’s important to have a mobile-ready site.

But what makes a mobile-friendly website?

A mobile-friendly website can adapt to the small screen size of your mobile phone. This usually means it shrinks images and formats the page to make it easier to read.

Making sure your website is mobile-friendly in the development stages can make your life a lot easier and save you time and money having to redevelop the site.

And there is another fundamental reason your site should be ready for mobile phones. And that is avoiding Google penalization.

They now prioritize anyone with a mobile-friendly site; in other words, you’ll struggle to rank if your site doesn’t adjust to mobile phones.

Make Sure Your Website Is Secure

There are a few reasons why your website should have great security. The first more obvious reason is, it protects you against attacks from hackers.

Hackers can cause serious harm to your reputability, steal personal data, and potentially bring everything crashing down.

But there’s another reason which is just as important:

In today’s world, websites that don’t feature HTTPS security are now being labeled unsecure. I’m sure you’ve seen this pop up a few times when you’re browsing the internet.

The problem is, this warning page confuses your potential customer. You see, it doesn’t necessarily mean the website is unsafe… It just doesn’t use HTTPS security.

But, it does stop people in their tracks, and more often than not, it makes them click away from your page.

This could mean you’re losing out on thousands of potential customers without even knowing about it.

Increase Your Site Speed For Better Results

Your website’s speed should be one of your top concerns when it comes to building your new website.

The easiest place to start increasing your site speed is in the development stages; it saves a lot of hard work later on.

But why is site speed so important?

As you can see from the image above, a 2-second delay will lose 40% of your users, which is a shocking percentage of people.

Increasing your website couldn’t be any easier; there are a number of SEO plugins you can use to help improve your speed.

They help reduce image sizes and lazy load your JavaScripts, which increases your load time. You can check out your site speed here. Anything higher than a 3 second load time is gonna need some work.

Make Sure Google Can Crawl Your Site

The more comfortable you make it for Google to crawl, the higher chance you have of getting your website to rank.

But, having an easy to crawl site does so much more than that; it also makes it easier for Google to identify new content.

Making the site easier to crawl means making sure your new content is delivered in a way that makes it easier for the search engines.

When building your website, you should make sure you regularly crawl the site to ensure Google can crawl the site quickly and efficiently.

Add Rich Snippets To Increase CTR

Adding rich snippets to your site is a fantastic way of making sure your pages stand out above the rest.

Rich snippets add relevant pieces of information to your Google listing that add value to anyone searching for what you’re offering.

This could be things like:

• Adding the price
• Star ratings
• Availability
• FAQs

Adding stuff like this makes your listing look more clickable by giving the reader the information they need.

The more inviting you make your listing, the more inclined they will be to click on it. And this is the first step of getting people through the door.

Keep Track Of Your Progress And Conversions

Keeping track of your progress, goals, and conversions during the development stages is a great place to start.

You can keep an eye on all your studies from previous sites using Google Analytics. This will show you all the essential data which you can compare with your new site.

Rounding Up

As mentioned before, multiple times, starting a new business online is like building a new house. You need to make sure all the foundations are set before you do anything.

Remember, it doesn’t matter how good your site looks; it will never take off without the right foundations.

So to give the best chance in the development stage, make sure you remember these eight things:

• Site architecture & internal linking
• Mobile-friendly design
• Site speed & user experience
• Crawlability
• Functionality
• Security
• Rich snippet optimization
• Keep track of your progress

If you do this, you can fast track your way to success.

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