There is a widespread misconception in website projects: many companies think, “Let's build a beautiful, impressive website and get it online first. After launch, we can hire an SEO specialist to fill in some keywords in the CMS and publish a few articles.”
When the site finally reaches the SEO team, everyone gets a surprise. They want to rank for long-tail industry solution queries, but no independent solution page templates were planned. They want to optimize key product terms, but the designer put 5 separate product categories into a single scrolling One-Page site in pursuit of minimalism, without individual URLs. They want to improve loading speed, but the frontend uses only client-side rendering (CSR), so the crawler finds nothing in the source except an empty <div id="app"></div>. Making changes at this point means dismantling and rewriting the website you have just finished.
For a truly SEO-friendly website, 70% of the work needs to be settled before the first design mockup or line of code is created.
Step one: create separate landing pages by search intent when drawing the sitemap
The basic unit of search ranking is an individual page (URL), not the entire domain. If one page tries to rank for corporate website development, app development, brand identity design, and mini program development at once, it often ends up ranking for none of them.
When JVDS begins website planning, we first use target customers' search habits to divide services with different search intents into independent second-level pages. For example, /service/uiux serves UI/UX design needs, /solutions/b2b-website serves B2B website needs, and /service/website-redesign serves existing-site redesign needs. Give each core intent its own URL, so each page can have the strongest possible relevance to its subject.
Step two: UI designers must make room for real text and semantic markup
Many designers with a purely visual background have a bad habit: because typesetting feels troublesome, they export product comparison tables or service process diagrams containing dozens or hundreds of characters as one huge PNG and paste it onto the page. Or they set heading sizes arbitrarily without distinguishing their hierarchy or telling the frontend team which is the page's single main heading, <h1>, and which are section headings, <h2>.
Our design guidelines have one firm rule: content containing core business keywords, technical parameters, FAQs, or process explanations must never be flattened into images. It must be designed as cards, lists, or responsive tables rendered with real HTML text. This keeps it sharp when resized on mobile and lets crawlers understand every level of the page's logic without obstruction.
Step three: lock in 4 foundational configurations during frontend and CMS development
During website development and design implementation, developers should provide these four things as standard, without waiting for marketing to ask:
- Server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG): The full body text and headings should be visible directly in View Page Source. Marquee and carousel components must not output identical nodes repeatedly in server-generated HTML.
- Short semantic URLs and customizable TDK fields: Every independent page and article in the CMS should support its own URL slug, title, meta description, and canonical tag. Do not force the entire site to share one fixed description.
- Automatic filtering of low-value indexable pages: Set paginated listings from page 2 onward, tag aggregation pages (
/topics/*), and internal search pages tonoindex, followby default. Include only high-quality business pages and in-depth articles insitemap.xml. - A high-performance image pipeline: Automatically convert uploaded images to, or provide them in,
.webpformat. Disable lazy loading for large first-screen images and addfetchpriority="high", giving the site a performance advantage over competitors from launch day.
