Critical SEO Checklist Items for Website Design & Development

SEO aka search engine optimization is a very helpful technique for the websites to gain the utmost rankings in the search engines through various keywords relevant to a particular webpage or website.

If your business doesn’t have any website then you must need a website to make your business found on the World Wide Web (WWW). There are a lot of website design and development companies available but you need to choose the best one for yourself.

So, today we are going to tell you what are the important areas that your newly developed website must have from the SEO perspective. So, without wasting time, let’s start…

1. 1. UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience) Design: UI and UX plays a key role in the success of any website. It’s very important that your website must have an easy to use and user-friendly navigation structure. You can hire a great website designer and developer to give you a great and hassle-free website design and navigation structure. A great designer and developer know the importance and all the techniques for developing a great website design and development structure.
   2. Keyword Research: Keyword research is another important factor that you must include in your checklist. If you are planning to design a new website then you must need to find out the keywords best suited to your website. Incorporating trendy and useful keywords are helpful to make the website visible more in search engines if placed relevant keywords gently within the website.You can use Google Keyword Planner and some other tools to find some great keywords for your website. Choosing great and potential keywords are not that much easier but we have a lot of tools available now for the same.
   3. Content is always king: Content always plays a key role for each and every website on the web since the inception of the web and search engines. Some of the giant search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Is always appreciates new, original, high-quality content, and relevant content and displays the websites in SERPs accordingly. Google always shows the new and high-quality content at first in SERPs that wins the greater amount of users trust. So, always do your best to create unique and relevant content for your website and upload the content in the relevant WebPages to gain the best rankings in SERPs.
   4. HTML Markup Improvements: HTML Mark-ups are HTML tags and there are a lot of tags available to use but we will only discuss the important tags which a website must have to strengthen SEO score. There are many HTML markup tags such as Title, Meta Description, Meta-robots, Author, canonical, NOYDIR, NOODP, and many more available. Let’s take a look at all the important SEO friendly tags and make sure to incorporate all of them on our newly developed websites.
      • Title: – Title tags are useful for every webpage of the website as it helps search engines to understand what kind of information the webpage carries. Title tags help search engines to understand what sort of content the webpage has and Google uses to display the webpage titles in the SERPs. So it’s very important to use an attractive and relevant Title tag to gain the attention of search engines and visitors both.
      • Meta Descriptions: – Meta descriptions are also used to display as a featured text in the SERPs and this also helps search engines and users to understand what type of content the webpage has. A well-written Meta description can give you great visibility and business leads from Google. A well-written Meta description must have unique and attractive content along with the brand and an appealing CTA. If you are having all these things then your website will surely get the best rank positions in Google.
      • Meta Keywords: – Meta Keywords tag is not a ranking factor for a very long time but still it is useful for the website to maintain the relevance of the keywords within the webpage content and HTML mark-ups. You should use Meta keywords tag to maintain the relevance and prominence of the keyword of your keywords in your website. It helps to increase the chances of your website getting more visible in search engine.
      • Meta Robots: – Meta robots tag is used to guide the search bots whether you are allowed to crawl the webpage or not. There are many attributes the robots file has and you can use those attributes according to your requirements. If you don’t want to index or crawl your website then you can use the Noindex, Nofollow attribute; and if you want to crawl and index your website then you can use the Index, Follow attributes.
   5. Image Optimization: Image optimization is one of the most important factors that have a great impact on SEO performance on the website. Use of high-quality but heavy images makes the website slow and increases the load time of the website. You should use high-quality images but make sure to use the image compression to keep the image quality same but make it lighter in size for the website.
      

      Some other important areas of the image optimization are as follows:

      • File name optimization
      • Image size optimization
      • Image type and the weight
   6. Alt Attributes: Alt attributes are also coming under the image optimization which tells the context of images to search engines. You should use the relevant and descriptive alt tag on images to let Google understand for what the image is all about. An alt tag is seen when the internet connection is slow or when the browser is unable to load the images due to some reasons. That time search engine uses the alt tag on behalf of the image so that user can know what type of image could be seen over there.
   7. Redirection Issues: There are many redirection errors a website has if not developed or looked carefully. So, when you are going to make your website live on the WWW make sure it has no redirection errors. Some of the redirection errors are 301, 302, 404, canonical redirection, www to non-www redirection issues and many more. You can check these issues and ask your developers to get all of these fixed accordingly. A website with no redirection error lands visitors to correct webpage or correct version of the website.
   8. Sitemaps: Sitemaps help search bots to crawl a website easily without any hassle. The sitemap contains all the URLs of the website and this is the first thing Google bot sees in the website while crawling. The crawling of a website becomes very easier and smoother when you’re providing all your website links to search bots on one destination (XML sitemap). Google doesn’t need to visit each and every page of the website and this improves the crawl speed also. There are various sitemaps available such as XML, HTML, ROR, and Image sitemaps and you can use them according to the requirement.
   9. Website Speed and Load Time: The speed of your website is also an important factor and you should consider this too in your checklist. Nobody likes to browse the website taking time to get loaded completely or have poor website speed. Everyone wants to browse faster and quick loading websites; it also helps to reduce the bounce rate on your website and gives an extra boost to improve the rankings of your website in organic search results in Google.There are several tools available to check the website load time and speed and you can check and optimize your website accordingly from those tools.
   10. Tracking and Analytics: Tracking and analytics are also an important factor in a website and you should use the Google Search Console and Google Analytics to check the health and traffic stats of your website. There are many tools available to monitor the health and traffic of the website and use the data to optimize the health and visibility of the website accordingly.ConclusionYou should check all the above-mentioned things to make sure that your newly developed website is fully ready and optimized well to go live on the World Wide Web. This checklist is very helpful for the newly developed websites to increase the usability and SEO performance.Feel free to give us a call if have any confusion, queries, and suggestions for us.