Websites exist in their variable forms across the internet, and many of them experience very few views even though they are hosting fantastic content. Why is this? Because they didn’t consider the implications of design-led SEO from the outset of their design!

In a digital world primarily governed by the locating websites on Google’s search results, it pays to be in the know when it comes to how you can design your site to be as visible as possible to ranking algorithms. Below is an expose of how exactly you can create a website with SEO in the forefront of your mind.

The first tip is to take your time when it comes to designing the optimal website for your business. Plenty of cheap or even free-to-use website-building platforms allow you to create an attractive website in an afternoon, but they’re nowhere near as influential in Google’s rankings than a more original, well-structured and consciously-designed site. You should hire experienced help to get your site off the ground, making the long-term investment to ensure your site experiences the traffic it deserves.

This is one of the labour-intensive but productive features of your design process that will continually perform a return on your investment. Schema, or structured data, makes it far easier for Google’s sophisticated algorithms to get their analysis of your site right on the first time of asking. They collect bundles of useful information, like your company’s contact details, into a distinct set of HTML code that Google’s crawlers can identify with ease. When this labelling is performed for every part of your site, you’ll find Google gratefully boosting your rating in search results.

While Google’s algorithms are attentive and intelligent, they’re not able to assess the overall tone of your site and the relevance of the messages you convey on it. As such, you’re going to want to give Google a leg-up through content curation that’s designed to be SEO-friendly. Think hard about the words that your target audience are going to be typing into search engines, and make sure that your content is tailored towards such searches. It pays to be forward-thinking in this respect, making your pinned and permanent site features as applicable as possible to the quests that will guide web users to your site.

Your website’s structure is another element of your overall design that has to be spot-on for you to optimize your position in Google’s rankings truly. A simple sitemap, directing Google’s crawlers (bots that assess your site) through the framework of your website, means you’ll be accommodating to the systems that decide where to place you in search results. Think carefully about how you will lay out your URLs, how you can optimize title tags, and make meta-descriptions of all your content in a way that will best display your website’s strengths and relevance.

Building from the ground up with SEO in mind will ensure that your completed website is gaining traffic from the get-go: a long-term investment with instant returns.