How to Design a Website That is Picked Up by Search Engines
Whey Web Design and Search Engine Optimization are Inseparable
Most people associate SEO with keywords and content, but a large part of how search engines evaluate your site comes down to its technical foundation. Things like page speed, mobile responsiveness, clean URL structures, and correct use of meta tags all influence whether Google can index your site effectively.
If your website has broken links, missing meta descriptions, slow load times, or pages blocked from crawling, it does not matter how well-written your content is, not as separate stages of a project.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that lets you monitor how your website is being crawled and indexed. Once you verify your website and submit a sitemap, it begins reporting on the technical health of your pages.
The most important report is the Page Indexing report, which shows the crawl and index status of every page on your website. Pages with errors cannot be indexed and will not appear in search results. The most common errors you will encounter are:
- Server Error (5xx):Your server failed to respond to Google's crawler. Contact your hosting provider to resolve the underlying server issue.
- URL Blocked by robots.txt:A page is being prevented from crawling your robots.txt file. Check this file and remove any rules that are accidentally important pages.
- URL Marked 'noindex':A 'noindex' directive is telling Google to ignore the page. Remove it from the page meta tags if you want the page indexed.
- Soft 404:The page loads but contains little or no useful content. Either populate it properly or redirect it to a relevant live page.
- Crawled Currently Not Indexed:Google has crawled the page but decided it is not valuable enough to index. Improve the content quality, add internal links pointing to it, and avoid thin or duplicate content.
Google Search Console's Page Indexing Report
Once you have fixed an issue, click the Validate Fix button in Search Console to prompt Google to re-crawl the affected URLs and confirm the problem is resolved.
SEranking's Website Audit
SEranking's Website Audit takes a broader technical look at your entire website. It crawls all your pages and produces a report organized by issue of severity, errors, warnings, and notices with errors being the most critical to fix first. Each issue comes with a description and step-by-step guidance on how to resolve it.
The report also gives your website a Health Score of 0 to 100, calculated based on the number and severity of issues found. Tracking this score over time is a simple way to measure your technical SEO progress.
Some of the most common issues SEranking detects include:
- Missing alt text on images:The most widespread issue across websites. Every image should have a descriptive alt attribute to help search engines understand the image.
- Missing or duplicate meta descriptions:Each page needs a unique meta description. Duplicates confuse search engines about which page to prioritize.
- Broken internal links:Links pointing to pages that return errors waste your crawl budget and hurt user experience.
- Mixed content(HTTP/HTTPS):If your website runs on HTTPS, some resources still load over HTTP; this creates security warnings and can affect your SEO ratings. Ensure all resources are served over HTTPS.
To access the Website Audit in SEranking, go to the menu on the left side of the page, click on Audit and there you will see all the options from issuing a report to carrying out a crawl comparision. You can also add an audit by clicking on the green button on the top right corner of the page that reads 'New Audit'. A popup will appear, and you will add your domain name, audit name, and user agent name.
SEranking allows you to schedule audits weekly or monthly, which is useful since new issues can appear any time you update your website.
Chrome Lighthouse
Chrome Lighthouse is a free auditing tool built directly into Google Chrome; no installation is needed. Open any page in Chrome, right click, select Inspect, navigate to the Lighthouse tab, and click Analyze page load. It produces a report across five categories, each scored from 0 to 100.
The most SEO-relevant categories are:
- Performance:Measures how quickly your page loads, using Google's Core Web Vitals as the key metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP):How long the largest visible element takes to load. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP):How quickly the page responds to user interactions. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS):How much does the layout shift unexpectedly during loading. Aim below 0.1.
- SEO: Checks fundamental on-page factors:Whether the page has a valid title tag and meta description, whether it is crawlable, whether links have descriptions, whether links have descriptive anchor text, and whether the page is mobile-friendly. Any page scoring below 100 here has straightforward issues worth fixing.
- Accessibility:Checks color contrast, alt text, and ARIA labels. A well-accessible site is generally a better-structured one, which search engines respond to positively.
Putting It All Together
These three tools cover different but complementary but aspects of search engine optimization web design. Google Seach Console tells you which pages Google cannot index and why. SEranking gives you a full technical health check with prioritized fixes across your whole website. Chrome Lighthouse helps you fine-tune individual pages for performance and on-page SEO quality.
The best starting point is always Search Console errors; pages that cannot be indexed will not rank regardless of anything else. From there, work through SEranking's issue report by severity, and use Lighthouse on your most important pages to address performance and Core Web Vitals.
Good web design and SEO are not separate disciplines. A site built with fast load times, clean code, correct meta tags, and no crawl errors is one that both users and search engines will reward.