The Holy Matrimony: The Role Of Seo In Web Development

It has been a long time coming but finally, after 35 years of living and being in so many role, a child, a college student, a line cook and just recently a chef, you're about to enter into another role, that of a restaurateur. Fully immersed in the food business, you're now focused on making sure that your new place can be easily found by potential customers, telling everyone you know of your new place and asking them to spread the news and making an announcement on your social media channel. In the digital age where a lack of physical location is the new normal, how would the above situation look? If we make the very reasonable assumption that websites take the place of the restaurant, then the hype-building mantle is now taken by the concept of search engine optimization or SEO in common parlance. Just as how the hype-building process should theoretically begin even before you're open, the process of SEO itself should begin early on in the web development stage.

How SEO manifests in web development

When the American doughnut chain Krispy Kreme opened their first store in Ireland, it proved so popular that traffic jams formed due to the excessively high demand and people aren't quite sure why. To wit, one bewildered mother whose children begged her to take them had this to say about the phenomenon, "it’s as if we’ve never seen a doughnut before”. Do SEO right and you might have your website crash due to traffic right on the first day. 

Well, probably not on the first day as it might take search engines quite a while until to crawl and index your website but the sentiment is similar. The misconception is that SEO is something you should deal with after, and when it comes to link building it is, but there actually things regarding SEO that you could do quite early in the process of web design and development. Here are 4 ways SEO manifest itself during the web development process.

Proper site architecture

Site architecture refers to how the various pages of your website are organized and connected to each other. When search engine crawlers are trying to index the entirety of your website, the sitemap, a topology detailing the hierarchical relationship between each page, is what they usually rely on for information. Websites that are properly organized could make the crawling and indexing process easier and would also help when actual human visitors to your website. 

I once visited an H&M branch with a layout as organized as an original Pollock and I walked out after about 5 minutes. Site architecture might not have a direct, immediate impact on the ranking your website on search engines but SEO is more about optimizing for humans instead of search engines and as such, having proper site architecture is indispensable.

Functionality and (a lack of) broken links

Technically, even without considering SEO, you should always make sure that everything in your website works as well as intended before going live. Another true story, I was once following the exit signs on a parking lot building somewhere where I was eventually lead into a non-working exit. As in, there's a gate there but it wasn't operating and since there was no attendant on hand, I was forced to literally drive around the edges of the building until I ran into the other exit. Trust me when I say that instances such as these are incredibly annoying. I mean, I might get amused for a second whenever I ran into a website with one of those cutesy 404 error messages, but I would still be annoyed. My thinking is that if you have the time to think up trivial amusement such as those, you should also have the time to ensure that your website works as well as it was intended to be.

Mobile-friendliness and responsive design

Five scores and a year ago, the Bolshevik revolution practically led to the collapse of the Russian empire, ending the autocracy of the Tsar and the abdication of Nikolai II. In the year of our Lord 2018, another revolution but nowhere near as drastic has also occurred in recent years. After years of being treated as second-class citizens, mobile internet users are now taking center stage, first when mobile-friendliness is adapted into a ranking signal by Google and when earlier this year Google launched the mobile-first indexing initiative.

You could read up further on what those changes mean to you and your websites but the general gist is the same, you have to make sure that the version of your website that is being displayed on your mobile devices doesn't pale in comparison with the desktop version. One proper way of achieving this is with the use of responsive web design, in which the contents of your website adapt itself to whatever screen size and orientation it's being displayed on.

SEO and web development

When building your own website, SEO is actually something that you should take into account quite early on the development stages and luckily, it's not something you have to go out of your way of to actually incorporate. The three things listed above for example, should be a part of any website even when SEO isn't being considered. If you've got the time to do those things now, do it. Postponing these to a later date is actually going to be more of a hassle.