The Importance Of SEO Website Development

November 25, 2020 | By: Scott Lard

Whether used for advertising, e-commerce, or as an important tool for your daily business operations, websites are increasingly important to modern businesses of all sizes and industries. As websites have become the go-to for customers and clients to find and interact with businesses, search engine rankings have become one of the most important aspects of business marketing.

Here, we’ll discuss why SEO, or search engine optimization, should be an essential factor in your business’s website development process. We’ll also discuss the importance of working with a web developer who is experienced in the SEO and the basic necessary SEO features your website should have.

SEO Website Development Components

Importance of SEO

How often do you use Google to find businesses for various needs? For most of us, the answer is nearly every day. This means that the higher your site ranks on Google and other search engines, the better your business reputation is, the more customers will visit your website, and the more sales and client relationships you’ll ultimately get. However, many business owners don’t give much thought as to how their business can get a higher ranking. The answer is SEO.

SEO refers to how well-optimized a website is for the methods used by search engines to ultimately determine where a page ranks. The process can be complex and is constantly changing, as the algorithms, components, and requirements by Google are always evolving. This means that in order to rank as high as possible, your website needs to be designed by an experienced SEO website development expert who can implement the necessary SEO features into your site.

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SEO Components Every Website Needs

SEO is a catch-all term that encompasses a wide array of specific components about your website that are evaluated by search engines to determine your page’s ranking. Although there are many factors to consider, below are some of the most important SEO components to consider when developing your website.

Metadata
Websites should be developed with optimized metadata for each page. Metadata is specific data that is used by search engines to determine the content and purpose of each page throughout your website. Metadata typically consists of things like page title tags and meta descriptions, both of which are essential in optimizing your search engine rankings.

Page titles are used by search engines to determine what the webpage is about. The page title is also what appears in the search engine results headline. Meta descriptions, although they do not affect search engine rankings, are still important aspects of SEO, because they appear as blurbs below the page titles in search engine results and help to tell users more details about the page.

Canonical Tags
When website designing for a business, often there are a number of pages that are similar in content. This is especially common for ecommerce websites and can make it hard for search engines to distinguish the difference between similar pages. Canonical tags help direct search engines to the right page. These HTML tags are inserted in the webpage’s code to help your site get a higher ranking.

Pagination
Another important aspect of SEO when designing your website is pagination. This SEO element is especially important for websites with a lot of content, because pagination helps divide content into more digestible pieces. Although pagination is important for SEO, too much or incorrectly used pagination can actually hurt your SEO ranking. It’s important for an SEO expert to help you determine the right methods for your site.

SEO-friendly Coding
Every webpage has a source code, which is the HTML code used to create the design and content of the site. When scanning your site, search engines utilize the various tags and HTML data within the site to determine how relevant your webpage is to the search term. It’s essential to have a website developer who understands how to factor SEO needs when coding your website.

Editor
Understandably, not every business owner or website manager knows the ins and outs of HTML coding. That’s why it’s essential that your website have a user-friendly content management system with an editor to help you manage your website’s content in a way that helps SEO. WYSIWYG, otherwise known as “what you see is what you get”, editors allow for you to easily manage content in a text editor while also adding in important header tags, which help SEO rankings.

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