The purpose of your website is to accomplish your business goals, which should include getting your audience interested in your website content. One way to do this is to ensure that the information on your website is relevant and valuable to your visitors. But more importantly, it must meet search engine optimization (SEO) best practices or be SEO-friendly if you want potential customers to find your website.
Your company’s profitability is directly related to the number of visitors to your website. So, it makes sense that your website should be optimized for search engines if you want to increase conversions.
An SEO agency can help you create an SEO-friendly website and, in turn, help your business grow, but what does SEO-friendly mean?
This post will provide a few tips to help craft a fully optimized website so your target audience can quickly locate it.
What Is an SEO-Friendly Website?
Websites with an SEO-friendly structure and content are more accessible for search engines to understand. Creating an SEO-friendly website allows search engines to crawl, understand and index content quickly.
SEO-Friendly Websites: Why They Are Important
Companies can reach the right target audience and get the most crucial step in the sales process through SEO. SEO and content marketing helps you gain visibility by generating top-of-funnel content for research-stage visitors.
By making your website SEO-friendly, you can attract more relevant traffic and increase conversions by keeping users on your site for extended periods. Well-optimized websites also allow for long-term organic growth without the need to continue advertising.
It’s clear what the advantages are. Now, how do you get there? First, let’s look at how you can make your website search engine friendly.
How Do You Make Your Site SEO-Friendly?
Search engines can index and crawl vital pages if you optimize your website for SEO. However, the process also involves analyzing the content of each page. Consequently, SEO should impact both the strategic and tactical executions of a website, as it affects both simultaneously.
Let’s look at how to create SEO-friendly websites and what the most important features are:
Get started With Top-Down SEO Strategy
You should choose a domain name that reflects industry perceptions and how often your target market searches for your products. Then, whenever you build a website, pick a domain name that matches the subject matter.
Ensure that your domain name stands out among your competitors. The name you choose should appeal to potential clients while being creative. Choose a name that appears in the search terms when the target audience is looking for industry knowledge.
Research Competitors
SEO experts utilize competitor research to create an SEO-friendly site quickly. They have built websites using data gathered from research and their competitors. You can check out your competitors’ keywords with SEMRush and Ahrefs. That way, you’ll save some time.
Prepare a spreadsheet containing all your competitors before you start building your site. Then, develop paperwork for each one of them. They must include relevant SEO information such as design, keywords, etc.
Ensure Your Domain Name Is SEO-Friendly
You should choose a domain name that reflects industry perceptions and how often your target market searches for your products. Whenever you build a website, pick a domain name that matches the subject matter.
Ensure that your domain name stands out among your competitors. The name you choose should appeal to potential clients while being creative. Choose a name that appears in the search terms when the target audience is looking for industry knowledge.
Design an SEO-Friendly Website Architecture
Making your website SEO-friendly requires careful consideration of its architecture. This is because your web pages’ architecture directly impacts how search engines will interpret them. That’s especially true for eCommerce websites and multi-page websites.
It’s natural for some pages on a website to be more significant than others. In a nutshell, Google wants to organize them so both bots and humans can understand. Lastly, and returning to the beginning of this discussion, you should build a visual plan before you begin designing or developing your website.
Choose a Reliable Host
Google also considers a website’s loading speed when ranking a site. Again, an optimal user experience is critical for your site. A long loading time results in a higher bounce rate.
Choose a good hosting service if you want to avoid this problem. For SEO purposes, you should never use a shared hosting platform. Rather than hiring a shared hosting provider, you should hire a dedicated one.
Use a Mobile-Friendly Design
Website visitors utilize a wide variety of devices to access these sites. The devices include mobile phones, desktops and laptop computers. Nevertheless, these devices run on various operating systems with multiple programming languages.
The websites should work on multiple devices without compromising the data collected. So, you need to make your website mobile-friendly. Keeping up with your competitors means having a mobile-responsive site.
Create Short URLs
Websites automatically generate long URLs that include information like the page’s full name and date of generation. However, short URLs are still good for SEO since they enable search engine crawlers to understand what your website offers. Thus, rather than using the default URLs, shorten them instead. Use only key terms. Ideally, it should be 3 to 6 words long.
Keep Your Content Engaging and Captivating
It is crucial to consider how fast the website loads when determining SEO strategies. You can tell whether your site takes a long time to load based on its content and design elements. Lightweight websites load quickly so that users have the best experience.
You should present content so readers can quickly gather information from your website. For example, put titles and subtitles in your content to organize certain information. Doing so will attract more visitors and get people to spend more time on your site.
Use the Appropriate Keywords in Content
Keyword research and optimization are a part of SEO. However, you should avoid stuffing your page with vaguely relevant keywords. Instead, conduct keyword research and employ keywords relevant to your target audience to aid in creating SEO-optimized content. Then, when the users search with your targeted terms on the search engine, your site will rank higher on SERPs.
Constantly Publish New Content
Search engines always favor updated and new information. Therefore, to rank higher and generate more traffic, you need to update your old content. Every time your audiences visit your website, they look for new information. If they keep landing on the same old pages, their desire to visit your website will wane. As a result, it will increase the bounce rate of your site.
You can hire a professional writer to develop new and interesting content. Remove old articles from the site and replace them with new, engaging blog posts. Rewrite and update your old content to incorporate updated information. It makes your website updated and more valuable to your target audience.
Improve Your Content’s Readability
SEO-friendly design involves numerous factors, and it’s easy to overlook the appearance of the content. If you are optimizing your website for search engines, ensure that the information on each page is easy to read. Having uninteresting content will not add any value to a first-class website design. A design sets the visual impression, while content sets the remaining impressions.
For instance, Google continuously rewards websites that satisfy the user’s needs and delight them. So, in addition to impacting the user experience, it increases the SEO friendliness of your site.
Optimize Header Tags
Using header tags is essential to providing structured and recognized information to search engines. In making a website SEO-friendly, optimizing header tags can be pretty helpful. You should use header tags for headings that begin a particular section of text. For instance, the subheading is an H3 tag, whereas the headline is an H1.
You should naturally put the most relevant keywords in your headers. Your title should contain your primary keyword, for instance. Including this helps search engines understand the context of your content and index it correctly. Also, you increase your ranking for the keywords you include in your titles and subheadings.
You can use secondary in smaller headings like H2 or H5. By doing so, crawlers can determine how deep and diverse your content is.
Create External and Internal Links
Your website becomes more credible when it contains internal and external links. Their presence acts as a testimonial to your content and brand. In addition, each of these links offers a unique set of benefits.
External Links: Search engines highly regard these links as evidence of your site’s quality. Your visitors will also appreciate your page because it links to relevant online resources.
Internal Links: These links connect pages on the same website. You can use it to redirect visitors to another page on your site. As a result, you’ll get more traffic, improve engagement, and increase sales.
Use links only when necessary and in an appropriate manner. Links considered inappropriate will result in penalties. In addition, if the links do not provide value to the reader, they may become problematic.
Create Unique Meta Description and Title Tags
Getting something from your SEO efforts relies heavily on title tags and meta descriptions. As a result, SEO-optimized sites may have trouble attracting users if their pages don’t seem sufficiently compelling to users.
In a sense, your page title and meta description function as a promotional banner. The content they convey impacts the visitor, influencing their decision to visit that site. Therefore, create relevant content that intrigues users enough that they will click on each page’s meta description.
Reduce the File Size of Images
Reduce the file size of your images to make your website load faster. Therefore, always upload the optimized version of your image to your website. Having optimized images on your website can improve the user experience.
When your site loads in less than a second, you have the image size down. Since blogs typically contain many graphics, a quick loading time is essential.
Optimize the Page Load Time
Although we’ve discussed this already, it bears repeating. Work on and maintain all methods possible to improve your website’s load time. An SEO audit can help you identify all the factors that need improvement to ensure a quick page load time.
Most users wait for a web page to load for five to six seconds. A long wait will likely result in them closing the tab and seeking another option. Therefore, page load speed optimization of a website is essential for lowering bounce rates and improving its SEO friendliness.
The Takeaway
Having learned what goes into making a search engine-friendly website, you can now put in the effort to build your business. An SEO-friendly website is essential for boosting your business’s online presence. Planning is essential, as SEO takes time to implement and provide results. Hopefully, this article gave you some insight into making an SEO-friendly website.