How to Design Your Website for Both Users and Crawlers

This is rather difficult since Google is insisting you should be designing for the user only, but until they develop artificial intelligence then we are going to have to help out their search engine in some way.

The new Hummingbird update reinforced this idea that traditional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is still the standard SEO, and that other little trick such as deep keyword research is not needed. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you design your website for both your readers/users and the search engine crawlers.

An Overused Keyword May be Replaced with Synonyms

Designing your website for crawlers and people must surly include the text, and the keywords in the text are still important (even in a post Hummingbird world). What you can do to help your case is to look through the text you just wrote and find out if you have used a keyword a lot. Maybe not excessively but just a lot. Now see if you may comfortably turn some of those keywords into synonyms of those keywords. This means that you are creating your content for the user but also for the crawlers too.

Keywords Would Appear Naturally if You Kept Your Writing on Target

This is something that people seem to forget or ignore. If you write about a certain topic then your desired keywords are going to come up in the text naturally anyway so there should be no need to force them into the text. This strategy may sometimes fail for three reasons.

The first is if the writer is uninspired or has a poor vocabulary. In that case the desired keywords may not appear in the text because of writer incompetence. The second reason is because the text struggles to relate to the theme the web master desires. For example, if you are selling paint via your website then there are only so many articles about painting your walls that you can create before your blog starts to look repetitive. A blog master may be tempted to switch focus a little in order to make things less repetitive, whilst at the same time try to insert relevant keywords.

The third reason is because the most commonly used keywords typed into the search engine are not easy to put into a sentence. This is especially true if the keywords have numbers, dates or locations in them. In these cases it is often difficult to have the keywords appear naturally within the text.

Follow the Three Click Rule with Your Navigation

This is good because it is useful for the reader of your website. It is also a good sign that your website navigation is very good, which is going to be handy for the search engine crawlers.

Create Clean Code of Just HTML and Externally Resource Other Codes

This makes your code easier for Google to index and makes your pages load and render a lot quicker.

Have HTML Links Only and Each with Anchor Text

Things such as JavaScript links are good enough for people, but they do not do the website crawlers any good because Google will not index them. That is why you should use HTML links so that people may use them and Google can index them.

Add ALT Text and Meta Information to Images and Videos

This will help the crawlers figure out what your video and images are all about. It also helps the user to see what should have been there and what would have been there if the element had loaded correctly.

Fast Rendering is Needed

If a website does not render quickly then the user becomes agitated and will often leave before the page even starts to load. It is unknown at the moment if Google is measuring the render time of websites, but it is a fair guess that if they don’t yet then they will one day.

Fast Loading is Even More Important

Google keeps a tab on how quickly your website loads and users are never keen on websites that take too long to load. A shorter loading time will please your users and will keep Google happy.

Read these also for Website Loading Speed Optimizations,

• How to Make Your WordPress Blog Lightning Fast
• Top 5 WordPress Speed Optimization Tips and Tricks
• W3 Total Cache versus WP Super Cache: Which is Better?
• How to Configure WP Super Cache

Lots of Internal Linking Makes Crawling Easier

This is because the website crawlers go through each link on your website and follow it through until they reach a page. If your website has plenty of internal links then they are going to crawl the website more efficiently. There is also less of a chance of the crawlers stopping before the website is fully indexed.

This is how you should have to design your website for both users and crawlers.