Why Does your Website Need to be SEO Friendly?
Having a website gives you an additional channel to achieve your business goals. But what’s the point of having one when it can’t even catch the eyes of your potential customers?
This happens because the site you build may not be SEO friendly. When developing a website, you need to make sure that search engine had least possible difficulty in crawling your site.
Businesses spend a lot on marketing, but some efforts on search engine optimisation can be crucial for your business. According to Google search statistics, 40,000 search queries are processed every second, 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. With such a huge audience, businesses can’t afford to avoid to develop an SEO friendly website.
How to draw up an SEO friendly website?
Optimise your Design
An SEO compatible web design can drive more traffic to your site. A stable hierarchy and easy to use navigation can be a base for a good web design. Use a consistent colour throughout your site. Spacings between your elements should be equal and remain consistent. Your web design should be better than your competitors' because web design is an important metric considered by search engines for determining the rankings of your web pages.
Adding more marketing elements to your web design can be a smart decision. You can include a call to action and social media buttons and necessary plugins.
Original and High-Quality Content
Content plays a vital role in optimising your website for SEO. Your website should contain authentic and high-quality content. This type of material which develops a sense of interest in users gets a high level of engagement. Before putting the content on your website, you need to do a deep research on the subject. Your content should provide the information your visitors are searching. More content is always good, and you should keep uploading and refreshing your content.
Search engines do not always recognise images, graphics, Flash files and Java applets so don’t overuse them if you have some quality content. Simple HTML text based format is best suited for indexing your content on search engines.
Before designing an SEO friendly website, it is necessary to carry a keyword research so that you know which keywords you should target. Placing keywords at right places of your content is crucial for your on page SEO. Also include keywords in your description, tags and metadata as they are displayed on Google results and prioritised for search rankings. Overusing keywords in your content is considered under black hat SEO and can hurt your search rankings.
Internal Link Structure
To index a page of your website, Google first needs to view that page. But how will that page get discovered? Either, the user will directly enter that page from the keywords they used, or the page may be having a link to some other page. Some pages might not be having any connection with the page you enter, and Google will not discover those pages.
A good internal link structure makes sure that more and more pages get listed in search results and ensures that a visitor gets least possible difficulty in accessing your website. All this contributes to rank your site better in search results.
URL Structure
Users many times find your URL name as keywords in search engines. Your URL structure is critical for SEO perspective. URL address is displayed in search results and can affect site’s visibility. You need to be careful and strategic before choosing a URL.
Choose a URL under your business niche, or you can use the actual name of your business. You can include a relevant keyword in your URL address. Doing this can work well for your SEO. A shorter URL is better than a long descriptive URL.
Website Testing
Testing your site is a crucial SEO activity. A site needs to be tested for different computers, operating system, browsers and mobile devices. A website working responsively on every platform ranks better on search results.
After successfully finishing all the tests, you can develop test scenarios and reports used to make some effective SEO decisions. Various tools are available which simplify your website testing process.
Wordpress for SEO
Wordpress was initially released in 2003, and till now it has come a long way since then. Unlike other CMS platforms, Wordpress is best suited for developing an SEO friendly business website. Many sites lying on the top pages of search engines are built on Wordpress. It offers so many plugins which are helpful for optimising your site for SEO and many other functionalities.
A prominent plugin is Yoast SEO which simplifies quite a few basic SEO needs as you can quickly optimise your title tags and headings or use the content editor of your website to do the same. Optimising your images is now easy using plugins like WP Smush. Wordpress offers open source customization with a variety of themes that can be modified as business requirements.