Rustam K. Lead Designer

SEO website design or what a designer should know besides design

Should a designer know the basics of SEO and how to help a client create a right website? Initially, the client wanted a landing page, but he was told that single page websites were not promoting well and it was better to make a multi-page site like a business card with a blog. In short, it needs a design with SEO in mind.

What to do? Should a web designer study something additionally or is it worth attracting specialists?

Or maybe a designer should give the contact of a SEO expert immediately during the first meeting with the client?

Of course, a designer who has an idea about all of the above earns additional points in the eyes of the client, as he/she can give advice on the main points. But the designer does not need to know and understand this.

Website promotion is a completely different service. And such work is carried out when the site is already uploaded to the hosting, and certainly not at the design stage.

On the other hand, there are now many designers who create websites with the help of builders. And if you are one of those who make turnkey websites, then you must know SEO at least at a basic level.

An example of what is available for optimization in the Tilda Publishing settings:

- H1-H3

- alt

- title

- description

- keywords

- open graph

- sitemap

- robots.txt

I now specifically went and looked at a dozen ready-made sites from the Tilda Publishing selection, and there, hell is already starting with the headlines.

Most websites don't have H1. Others have it, but it comes after H2 and so on... It seems that the designers have not heard about basic optimization at all.

Correct title tags are very important for indexing and ranking pages. I will not dwell on this in detail, since the topic is deep and will not fit into one article.

They should not just be wrapped in a div, but should have h1-h6 tags.

Texts

A designer should not be able to write landing texts or blog articles optimized for key queries.

You should be able to distinguish good text from bad if it is a landing page or the text for the main page of a multi-page site. It's enough.

The ability to edit submitted texts will be a plus. For example, I often do this. I can paraphrase something, shorten something, add something, change places. But we are not talking about writing a text from scratch with a length of 1000+ characters.

Working with the text, the designer works out the structure of the page, the convenience of information perception, and the presentation of content. Typography improves behavioral factors, which means it will affect the ranking of the site in the SERP. This is your area of ​​responsibility for SEO.

Should a designer write SEO texts?

A designer is not required to be able to write SEO texts. This is what SEO copywriters do. But for example, when developing design layouts, you are obliged to provide a block on the main page of the site for such text. This of course depends on the specific project and is not always required. But the designer is obliged to know and keep such things in mind.

If you have already been given SEO text and it looks disgusting (written for robots, not for people), then you, as a competent designer, will have two ways:

- Try to persuade the customer that now such texts will not help to promote the site, but cause harm instead, since search robots have learned to distinguish texts for people from texts for robots.

- If the client trusts his SEO more than you, then your task is the following: make this text less visible and not annoying to visitors. For example, like this, hiding it in a scrolling frame.

What did the client mean?

We return to the question. What is SEO-friendly design, because this is what the client asked for…

If a client tells you they need a SEO-friendly design, this does not mean that he expects relevant texts from you. This means that the site is planned to be promoted not with the help of SMM, contextual advertising and other paid traffic, but with the help of content. This is where organic traffic matters.

So your task, as a designer, is to make the site aesthetically pleasing for the target audience and correct in terms of usability.

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