Web design SEO - 17 tips without which nothing works!

A new website with a modern web design - that's what many entrepreneurs want. But what good is the best and most beautiful website if it has no or hardly any visitors and you don't generate any customers with it?

Exactly. Nothing.

On the one hand, websites have the task of presenting your product or service in the best possible way and, on the other, they have to convert interested parties into customers. However, they can only fulfil these tasks if they can be found in the search engines and generate visitors there.

This is the reason why a website needs a good, functional web design and SEO in equal measure. Contemporary web design supports the search engine optimisation of your website and helps it to be found in Google.

If you want to learn more about how to make your website more search engine friendly, read this article carefully. You'll find some golden nuggets.

What is SEO web design or web design SEO?

Web design SEO refers to the implementation of SEO-relevant factors when creating a website in order to make it more search engine friendly. Web design is therefore not just about the obvious graphic elements, but also and above all about the implementation of functions, structural and technical criteria that Google and other search engines specify as so-called ranking factors.

Some of the measures are visible, such as a convincing "above-the-fold" area, a table of contents or a clear heading structure, while others are hidden from the user in the website code. Together, they result in an SEO web design that, in addition to other search engine optimisation measures (e.g. keyword research, SEO texts or image SEO), ensures that your website is found in the top positions on Google.

Your website and its web design should fulfil these SEO criteria:

OnPage web design SEO criteria

• "Speaking" URLs (Uniform Resource Locator)
• The "above the fold" area (the 3-second rule) Internet users are impatient, answer 3 questions
• Usability and user-friendliness
• Menu structure
• Table of contents
• Heading structure
• Citations

Technical web design SEO criteria

• Mobile friendliness
• Fast loading times
• The SERP snippet
  • URL
  • Title TAG
  • Meta Description
• robots.txt
• HTTPS certificate
• Provide sitemap
• Structured data

Why is SEO web design so important?

SEO web design is so important because, on the one hand, it is necessary for ranking in Google and, on the other, because it has a significant influence on user behaviour (conversion, purchase, dwell time, etc.).

A web design that takes into account the important criteria of search engine optimisation responds to the needs of website visitors and ensures that they feel comfortable on your website and are able to use it intuitively within a very short time - which has a positive effect on sales figures, newsletter entries, number of enquiries, etc.

Let's take a brief look at the individual criteria and discuss what you need to bear in mind.

The most important SEO web design measures

"Speaking" URLs (Uniform Resource Locator)

Speaking URLs are short and meaningful. Ideally, they contain the focus keyword. This makes them easy for Google to categorise and easy for users to remember, share or type into the browser address bar.

Examples of speaking URLs for a service provider:

• Domain (homepage): https://www.ithelps-digital.com
• Overview page: https://www.ithelps-digital.com/leistungen
• Service page: https://www.ithelps-digital.com/leistungen/webdesign
• Blog: https://ithelps-digital.com/blog

Examples of speaking URLs for a web shop:

• Domain (homepage): https://www.firmenname.com
• Category page: https://www.firmenname.com/kategorie
• Product page: https://www.firmenname.com/kategorie/produktname

The "Above the Fold" area

The "above the fold" area is the area that the user sees without scrolling when they visit a web address. This area is particularly important from a search engine optimisation perspective.

Users who reach your website by clicking on the SERP snippet (more about this later) in the Google search results or another link have 3 questions.

• Am I in the right place?
• What's in it for me?
• Can I trust the page?

You usually have 3-5 seconds to answer these questions. If you don't succeed, the user (your potential customer) will leave the site again and will most likely be lost forever.

For this reason, you should ensure that you place the most important information in the "above the fold" area. Our home page looks like this, for example:

If you don't observe this SEO rule and users leave your website after a few seconds, this sends a negative signal to Google and you will fall back in the search results.

Usability and user-friendliness

Usability and user-friendliness are important web design SEO criteria for the same reason as the previous point. It's about keeping users on the website for as long as possible. The longer, the better for your rankings. Every positive signal that Google registers has a correspondingly positive effect on your positions in the search engines.

Here are some measures that you can easily implement:

The menu structure

Create a menu structure that users can navigate intuitively. Make sure that each subpage can be reached with a maximum of 3 clicks. This is called the click depth. Google loves pages with a low click depth.

Here is the menu structure of the IKEA website:

The table of contents

For blog articles, which often have a large number of headlines and subheadlines, a table of contents has proven to be particularly user-friendly.

The background: Google users or users of other search engines are looking for information. They want to find this information quickly and without having to search for a long time.

For a blog article with 1500, 2000 or even 5000 words or 10, 15 or more chapters with associated subheadlines, searching for information would prove to be difficult and time-consuming.

Help your readers with a table of contents, like the one below from our blog post The 10 WordPress plugins you'll need in 2024:

The heading structure

Website visitors tend to scan the content of a website before diving deeper into it. A clear, hierarchically meaningful headline structure helps readers to grasp the most important content as they skim through it. Headlines (H-TAGs) and sub-headlines organise the content and guide the reader through the website like a red thread from start to finish.

Headlines are referred to as H-TAGs - where the H stands for headline - and are numbered from H1 (main headline) to H6 depending on their position in the hierarchy.

This is what a clear heading structure should look like:

This is the technical realisation of the headings, i.e. part of the web design and therefore the task of the web designer. Headings play another important role in search engine optimisation, namely when writing the text content of a website - the so-called SEO texts.

Citations

Make sure that your company details - company name, address, opening hours, telephone number, email address - are clearly visible on your homepage and all subpages. This can be achieved, for example, in the form of a top bar, as on our website.

You should make sure that the company details on your website, Google Business Profile, all company directories, your social media presence and everywhere else on the Internet are identical and spelled the same way. This helps Google to clearly identify them and assign them to your company.

Those were the visible web design SEO measures. Now let's move on to the technical ones.

Mobile friendliness

Modern websites must be mobile friendly. This means that they must be displayed and usable on smartphones just as flawlessly as on a desktop or tablet.

Google attaches particular importance to this, as the majority of Google users use their smartphones to surf the internet and search for information and products.

If you want to find out whether your website is mobile-friendly, check it with the Google Developer Tool Mobile Friendly Test.

Fast loading times

Another important criterion of web design SEO is to ensure that the page loads quickly. Users hate nothing more than a slow loading website. If the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, users will click the back button and be gone forever. Google also sees this quick bounce as a negative signal, which has a correspondingly unfavourable effect on your rankings.

You can check the loading speed (page speed) with the developer tool "Google Pagespeed Insights" and at the same time the tool makes suggestions to improve the page speed.

The SERP snippet

The SERP snippet is the "snippet" of a website that is displayed in the search results. It consists of the URL, the title, the meta description and possibly other elements, such as the date of publication or ratings.

This is meta information that is stored in the HTML code of the page.

For example, the snippet of our web design service page:

The SERP snippet is the first thing users see of your website. For this reason, special attention should be paid to optimising the individual elements.

URL

We have already discussed the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) at the beginning. URLs should be short and meaningful, as you can see in the graphic.

Optimised URLs are meaningful and ideally contain the focus keyword.

Title TAG

The title must attract the attention of Google users - which you can support with symbols. The keyword should be included and it should be clearly recognisable what the website is about. The title should not be longer than 70 characters or 500 pixels.

Meta description

The meta description is the short description of the page. It must describe in a few words what the user can expect on the website. At the same time, it must arouse curiosity and encourage users to click. I usually also include the focus keyword and a few relevant terms.

Expert tip: When creating your SERP snippet, use one of the SERP snippet tools available online. My favourite is the free tool from SISTRIX.

robots.txt

The robots.txt file is a text file that is stored in the root directory of a domain and controls search engine access to the website. Certain areas of the website can be "blocked" for certain or all search robots. Google and other search engines specify that the instructions defined in robots.txt are to be followed.

This is what a robots.txt looks like:

The purpose of robots.txt is, among other things, to direct the valuable crawling budget to where you want it and not to waste it by crawling unimportant website areas.

HTTPS and SSL certificate

In August 2014, Google switched to introducing HTTPS (hyper-text-transfer-protocol-secure) as a ranking factor. Since then, websites with HTTPS protocol have had an advantage over websites without an SSL certificate.

You can find out everything you need to know about HTTPS and the SSL certificate in the articles Why and how you should switch WordPress to HTTPS [instructions] and Switch Joomla to https [instructions].

Providing a sitemap

The sitemap is something like the table of contents of your website. The purpose of these sitemaps is to show search engines, such as Google, which web pages should be searched by their web crawlers and listed in the search index.

Thanks to the sitemap, the Googlebot is not forced to waste valuable crawling budget when crawling your entire site. It uses the entries to recognise which pages or blog posts are new or updated and limits itself to these.

Here is our sitemap as an example:

More about the sitemap.

Structured data

Structured data is information or content on a website that is specially labelled for search engines. This makes it easier for the bots of Google and other search engines to categorise the data. Structured data helps the search engine crawlers to better understand the content of a website.

The advantage: Google rewards the addition of structured data with an increased presence in the SERPs. The search results are often given more space. For example, the presentation of so-called rich snippets in the SERPs is enhanced with information on price, rating or availability. This significantly increases the click-through rate (CTR) for searchers.

In our snippet, for example, the ratings are displayed:

More on the topic of structured data

Conclusion on SEO web design

You have now learnt about some of the most important measures of good SEO web design. I've shown you which obvious criteria need to be met and which technical factors need to be considered. Here again as a reminder:

OnPage web design SEO criteria

• "Speaking" URLs (Uniform Resource Locator)
• The "above the fold" area (the 3-second rule) Internet users are impatient, answer 3 questions
• Usability and user-friendliness
• Menu structure
• Table of contents
• Heading structure
• Citations

Technical web design SEO criteria

• Mobile friendliness
• Fast loading times
• The SERP snippet
  • URL
  • Title TAG
  • Meta Description
• robots.txt
• HTTPS certificate
• Provide sitemap
• Structured data

If you pay attention to these points when developing your website and its web design, you are already well positioned in terms of search engine optimisation.

Of course, there are numerous other SEO or ranking factors that need to be taken into account in search engine optimisation. Web design SEO alone is not enough to be at the top of the search engine rankings. However, alongside good SEO content, successful on-page optimisation and a comprehensive link building strategy, it is an important component of your search engine optimisation.

If you have any questions about web design SEO or need support with implementation, give us a call on +43 1 353 2 353 or contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. We look forward to hearing from you.