3 Rules for Creating an SEO-friendly and Beautiful Website

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It’s not enough to just have a pretty website. The truth is that Google really doesn’t care. Sure, your customers will generally love your website if it looks professionally done, but that doesn’t mean a pretty website is ranked highly by Google on the strength of its prettiness alone. In fact, you’ll often see ugly websites at the top of Google’s search results and such sites tend to much better when they have many visitors than pretty sites do when they have none.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m certainly not advocating for ugly websites here. A professionally designed website following modern best practices is still a terrific option. However, there is something else you should consider when designing your website if you want it to do well in the rankings: SEO-friendly design.

We had a chat with Anna Lang of Smart Street Media, a search engine optimization company, and she gave us three comprehensive rules for creating an SEO-friendly and beautiful website.

1. Go for Responsive Web Design

If you’re going to need a long pep talk at this point about just how important mobile is becoming and how more than 50 percent of your site’s visitors are doing it on their mobile phones, then you’re reading the wrong article. This is something that’s pretty much become a fact and everyone who’s serious about SEO understands that responsive web design is the way to go.

Your website will be SEO-friendly if it is responsive. That means it’s going to look OK and function perfectly no matter what the size or dimensions of the screen it’s being viewed on. Even Google keep pointing out that a responsive website is the way to go. When the very people who are ranking you tell you that something is best, then you would be wise to implement it.

2. Make Sure Your Pages Can Be Crawled and Indexed

Search engines can’t rank you if they can’t see you. Even if your website is the most beautiful website in the entire universe, with the best content ever produced in the entire universe, it’s all for naught if Googlebot’s spiders can’t see it.

As a web developer, you need to launch your website in a form that can be crawled easily and indexed by search engines immediately. That means you shouldn’t minimize the amount of Flash and JavaScript you have on there and also have readable text for just about everything from the actual content to the visuals and tags. You can also use schema markup to give Google even more information about your website. Failure to do this means you’ll have an awesome site that your potential visitors will never be able to see.

3. Your URL Structure Should Be Search Engine-friendly

When you’re structuring your URLs, giving individual pages on your website addresses, make sure the URLs are in such a way that search engines can parse them easily and figure out what the page is about from the URL. Search engines are looking to make things easier for users so they can find answers to their search queries immediately. Help them do this and you’ll be rewarded with higher rankings.