This is the ultimate SEO-friendly design checklist for 2020. If you are looking for a comprehensive checklist to follow for building a complete SEO-friendly website, then you just found the right place.

This checklist is based on Design and will focus on almost all the areas essential. Eg. Mobile SEO, Technical SEO, On-page SEO, and much more.

Unique Title and Description for all pages

Each page of the website must include a unique title and description where the title are between 60 to 65 characters and descriptions are approx 150 characters. Title and description describe what the page is all about. Optimize both the title and description.

Well-formatted URLs – URLs

Links or slugs of the webpage should be SEO friendly, they should be descriptive, all lower case and should always be separated by dashes.

Fast-loading web pages

Both people and search engines don’t want the website to load slowly. Fast-loading websites have an advantage in ranking. The fast-loading website generates more impressions for the user. It is very important to improve the load speed of the website. Issues that cause slow loading may be because of many plugins, too many graphics or large images, outdated CMS, or poor servers. 

Use Lazy Loading for images and videos can also improve the load speed.

Image optimization

Include the images that are optimized for search engines. Images are more interesting, easier to read, and shareable. It is very important to optimize the image this includes, compressing the image, using proper Alt attribute, etc.

The steps for better image optimization are:

• Image name — provide the name that clearly describes what the image is.
• Alt text — It is very important to have alt text descriptions so that any visually impaired person can understand the pictures on your website. Search engine bots also crawl alt text for a better understanding of the images.
• Add OpenGraph (Use of OG tags) and Twitter Cards so the image is used in social shares.
• To ensure fast downloads use the image at the right physical size.
• Optimize the image’s size to improve loading times.
• Consider adding images to your XML sitemap, use the appropriate site map.

Meaningful structure

A web page usually should have the following elements:

• Header
• Breadcrumb menu
• Page Title (H1 tag - only one per page)
• Well-formatted text – a chunk of text is separated into several short paragraphs with subheadings
• Author information
• Footer - The footer is located at the bottom of the site pages. A website footer is found at the bottom of the site pages. It includes vital information such as a copyright notice, a disclaimer, or a few links to relevant resources of the organization.

Custom 404

If you don’t have your custom 404 page then the user may think the site is broken. You can also use the custom 404 page during the redirect. 

Responsive design

Each device is different in size and the version it has. So it is very important for the website to adapt to fit the differences resulting in the best user experience no matter what the device is being used. If you don’t adjust for all the devices then you won’t be able to give a positive experience for the user.

Assets minification

Enabling minification on assets like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files can help you reduce their transfer size. This means every time a page is requested from your website less bytes or lighter assets are sent over the network which loads your website faster for your customers with the quick transfer.

Optimize header tags

Optimize the header tags to help search engines understand the page. Optimize the headers, use the most important keywords into them. Also, remember to align the header tags with the visual hierarchy. Integration helps google to understand the context of the page.

Usability

Key factors to consider for SEO friendly design:

Page layout: Important elements should have more distinction.

Visual hierarchy: Try using more important elements.

Home page and site navigation: Provide a glimpse of every direction for users.

Site search: A search option is required for Large sites or sites with several contents.

Form entry: Make forms as simple, attractive and easy to fill as possible.

Design: Fabulous design makes everything easier.

Canonical URL

Without the implementation of the canonical URLs, we might face some issues. We might have several pages with similar contents, here we need only one to rank. This is where using canonical URLs plays a role.

Example:

https://topnepal.net

    https://www.ink2paper.net

    https://m.ink2paper.net

    http://ink2paper.net/index.php

    http://ink2paper.net/index.php?r…

<link href="https://ink2paper.net" rel="canonical">

Integrate Social Media Accounts into your Website Design

Nowadays Search engines value social media, as well as prospective customers. Incorporating social media elements into your design will help to rank better. Make sure to include your social media icons for the relevant accounts. This helps the website to show its potential for the customer. ( Reliable)

Flash Elements
Be careful while using the flash elements. Using too many flash elements on a website can be distracting for your visitors. It can affect the search engine ranking. Flash is often ignored and devalued by search engines.

Incorporate a Blog
Incorporating a blog section on a website is very important in 2020. This section helps to establish the business owner as an expert in a field. Having a blog section can increase the engagement with the help of visitors leaving comments. Blog section acts as a greater SEO booster.

Redirects
Removing and renaming pages is a common practice, you should make sure to redirect the URL to its new location, but if possible, update all internal links to that URL. Use 301 redirects to tell search engines that the old page URL is now the new page URL. This will ensure you keep the traffic and SEO value for the webpage. Any links to old pages will link to the new pages when we use 301 redirects, which will help to maintain the domain authority.

Formatting for readability
Simply it means organizing the content in a well-formatted structure

Text size and color: Avoid using fonts that size too tiny. Google recommends a 16-point font and above. This helps to minimize the need for “ zooming” on mobile. The text color about the page’s background color should also promote readability.

Headings: Separating your content with helpful headings can help readers navigate the page.

Bullet points: Great for lists, bullet points can help readers skim and more quickly find the information they need.

Paragraph breaks: Avoiding chunks of text encourages site visitors to read more of your page.

Supporting media: Include images, videos, and widgets that would complement your content on the page.

Bold and italics: Putting words in bold or italics can add emphasis, so they should be the exception, not the rule.

Sitemaps
There are many types of sitemaps like HTML sitemaps, XML sitemaps, video sitemaps, and image sitemaps. Search engine programs use the sitemap to understand the architecture of the website and the better they understand it, the higher will be the chance of a good rank on the search engine websites. It is recommended that you use XML Sitemaps which are visible to only the search engines. If you wish to have the images of the website displayed on the image searches, you need to use image sitemaps. Video sitemaps are useful for the SEO aspect of the website. To ensure that Google can crawl and index your images, submit an image sitemap in your Google Search Console account.

Optimizing crawl and indexing

To help search bots crawl, index, and differentiate (if they are different) your mobile site pages, make sure you:

Create a mobile XML sitemap

Submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console.

Never design your site using pop-up windows that cannot be discovered through a sitemap crawl.

Make sure to implement rel=canonical, rel=alternate media 

Make sure to allow the Googlebot and Google Smartphone user agents to access your site.

Design for Mobile UX
Are you using Click-to-Call buttons?

Is your logo a button that makes it easy to get back to your home page?

Are your buttons finger-friendly?

Have you placed your most important CTA button above the mobile fold?

More than half of your inbound traffic is unlikely to return to your mobile site if they are met with a poor user experience.

Setup Analytics and Search console
Google search console is designed to track the site’s performance in Google search. Its many helpful features include analyzing traffic we get from google, traffic in an individual page, rate of increase and decrease in traffic, average bounce rate, page views and many more.

Connect Google Analytics with the Google Search Console this can be helpful to get SEO information from inside of your Google Analytics account.

Use Schema Markup
Schema markup helps search engines understand our content effectively. Implementing Schema can be tricky for this. We can also use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Adding structured data markup data to the Homepage
Nowadays Schemas and structured data are very important for SEO.

They can help you heighten your website’s appearance in Google search results, they are good for local SEO and for Voice SEO. There are many people who forget to add the necessary structured data to their homepage and this is a big mistake.

Optimize your website’s logo and favicon
Make sure that the logo is an image and not text. Google may decide to show a logo in the search results and in order to do so, it has to be an image.

Give your logo the correct name. Add ALT text with the logo. When it comes to the favicon, make sure to specify a custom favicon for the site that is square in size.

Google shows the favicons in the search results so we need to make sure that the website is represented properly.

Language attribute
Lang(XML: lang) attribute specifies the language of the website content. The HTML lang can be used to declare the language of the portion of the webpage or the whole web page. Basically this kind of attribute is used to assist search engines and the browser.

Wrapping up
For driving more traffic online to your business, you must create an SEO-friendly website. When your site is friendly to search engines, you can appear in more relevant search results and boost traffic on your website. SEO takes time to implement and show results. Hence we will need to spend time planning the SEO strategy.

We need SEO Friendly website for the following reasons:

It gives you brand credibility

It is cost-effective

It helps you understand what your customers want

It will make your website user friendly

Increase in organic traffic