Modern businesses striving to establish their online presence tend to believe that merely posting voluminous content will help them rank higher on search engines, even if the website is considerably outdated, inefficient, and substandard. They lose sight of the intricate connection between web development and SEO.
However, website designing plays a vital role in SEO, as the design elements and user experience directly affect search engine rankings, the website traffic, and the overall online visibility. A smartly designed website enhances user engagement and retention while also enabling search engines to crawl and index the site more effectively.
In this article, we shall try to understand exactly how web development and SEO are related to each other.
Understanding the Correlation Between Web Development and SEO
Web development and SEO are interlinked in more ways than we expect. Discussed below are some of the quintessential elements of web development and their impact on SEO.
- Responsive Web Design
Believe it or not, your website’s user experience (UX) is one of the key factors that affect SEO ranking. A highly responsive and compatible web design ensures that your site functions efficiently on different devices, such as smartphones and tablets, thus providing a seamless browsing experience to your visitors.
Search engines like Google prioritize responsive websites in their search results because they are capable of delivering an exceptional user experience, which can lead to increased traffic and conversions.
- Website Page Load Speed
The loading time taken by a website is another element that draws a strong linkage between web development and SEO. Faster loading pages not only provide a better user experience, but they also rank higher on search results as search engines perceive these sites as more efficient and customer-centric.
Therefore, the process of website development should heavily emphasize optimizing media elements, minimizing HTTP requests, and using caching techniques to decrease page load times, thus improving the SEO ranking.
- Clean and Structured Code
While crawling and indexing the websites content search engines tend to prefer structured and easy to understand codes as it helps improve the site’s SEO ranking. It is, therefore, essential to write clean and well-structured codes while developing and designing a website.
Developers can employ techniques like code minification, organizing CSS and JavaScript files, and using semantic HTML to optimize the site for search engines.
- Leveraging Schema Markup
Schema markup is code (semantic vocabulary) that enables search engines to understand the content on your website in a better way. In other words, it tells the search engine what that content means.
In addition, Schema markup allows your website to rank higher for various content types, as there is data markup for multiple different types of data, such as articles, restaurants, local businesses, book reviews, frequently asked questions, TV episodes and ratings, movies, events, products, and software applications.
This categorization helps search engines provide richer results on SERPs, thereby attracting more user engagement and improving the site’s SEO ranking.
- URL Structure and Site Navigation
While working on web development and SEO, it is crucial to note that search engines factor in the overall organization and accessibility of your website when determining its ranking. Hence, executing clear navigation menus, employing descriptive anchor text, and a logical URL structure can significantly contribute to your website’s SEO ranking.
Moreover, an organized site will remarkably enhance user experience, which is critical (as mentioned above) to retaining visitors and reducing bounce rates.
- Mobile-centric Development
Studies indicate that 55% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, whereas 92.3% of internet users access the internet with a mobile phone. Hence, it is essential to develop websites that function efficiently on mobiles.
Following a mobile-centric approach during the development process entails creating mobile friendly user experience by strategically using CSS media queries and employing a mobile-first index.
Web Development and SEO: Summing it Up
The aforementioned points will surely help you gain a better understanding of how web development and SEO go hand-in-hand. However, considering the multivarious aspects while developing a website in lines with SEO may be trickier than you imagine. It is, therefore, advisable to work with experienced website development Professionals like Expro Lab.
We have a highly proficient team of website developers and SEO experts who work closely to ensure that your website not only performs seamlessly and provides a great user experience, but also excels all the parameters required to make it on the results page.
