How to Design an SEO Friendly Website that Ranks Well
5 min read
If you’ve got a business, and you’re looking to get more exposure, then you’ll need a website. We live in a digital age where everyone is looking for quick and easy solutions online, and, without a site, your potential new customers won’t be able to reach you. However, just having a website doesn’t mean you’ll get noticed too – for that, you need a carefully constructed SEO-friendly website.
What is SEO and what does it do? SEO stands for search engine optimization, and its primary function is to rank you higher in Google’s search engine. If you’re looking to optimize your website, but are unsure how, here’s a quick guide on how to do it.
SEO and SMEs: Q&A with Chris Rodgers, Founder and CEO of Colorado SEO Pro
1. Consult the Professionals
Firstly, if you’re new to web design and SEO, consulting the professionals might be the best course of action. After all, that’s why they’re the professionals!
Australia has plenty of excellent web design companies, and many a quality digital design agency Melbourne dwellers, in particular, can peruse. Contact one of these agencies and you’ll quickly find yourself with a professionally-done website that will attract many visitors, and, hopefully, convert a good portion of them.
2. Introduce Keywords
Introducing keywords is essential to ranking high on Google’s search engine. However, don’t underestimate the engine’s intelligence – just stuffing your keywords in your texts won’t push you up the ladder. In fact, your texts might get flagged for low-quality content, pushing your website further down.
The point here is introducing the keywords in a smart way, such as putting them in the title of your articles and pages, as well as into the URL. Adding keywords to the meta description snippet (the bit of text under your link in the browser) is also a good way of boosting your rankings.
3. Optimize your Images
Optimizing the images for SEO on your pages can do wonders for your website. You see, the search engine cannot understand images or media, making it hard for it to index them. Having your images indexed will make your website more relevant to somebody’s search terms, especially if they’re looking for a picture of a product.
The best way to help your images get indexed is to add alt text, and then add a keyword in the alt text itself. Since the Google search engine can only understand the text, it will refer to alt text when indexing the pictures on your website, and then offering them as relevant search items to users. In addition, reducing image size is also a good idea, as the most indexed images are about 30-100 kb.
4. Optimize Your Media
As with pictures, your media should also be optimized for SEO. Many people fail to do so, which causes their rankings to suffer, whereas they could have gotten a nice bit of boost from properly indexed pictures and videos.
When it comes to videos, adding a transcription is the way to go. As we said, the search engine only understands the text, so having a transcript of the video will help the engine recognize the video and tie it to relevant keywords and searches.
5. Use Sitemaps
A very neat little way of getting your website indexed more quickly is to use sitemaps. Sitemaps are, well, for the lack of a better word, maps of your website the way a browser sees it. It’s a collection of all the pages and links, both external and internal, which occur on your website. Google uses these maps to index the website and present it when a relevant keyword appears.
6. Optimize Your URLs
It is shocking how many people completely disregard URL optimization. Because they’re generated automatically, most people think they’re fine and that they don’t matter to the users and the search engine.
However, users are much more attracted to easy-to-remember URLs than jumbled, incoherent ones. Ideally, your page URLs should be descriptive of your website and what’s it all about. If you’re selling a type of product, then the URL leading to that product should contain the name of your page, category and product name. This makes it easier for both the customers and for the engine to find you. Be careful, though, as overly complicated URLs can have a negative impact on your rankings.
7. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Due to the prevalence of mobile devices, having a website that is not mobile-friendly will seriously hurt your cause. Most of the web browsing is done on mobile devices nowadays, and you’ll have to adapt to the conditions of the market and to the users to stay afloat.
Mobile optimization isn’t as hard as one might think, but it is essential. Sometimes it simply comes down to not using JavaScripts, as most mobile devices have a problem with displaying JavaScript code. You should also consider modifying the website layout to fit a phone screen and create a navigation system, especially for mobile devices.
8. Introduce Backlinks
Link building is the entire craze nowadays when it comes to SEO. Introducing quality internal links, and natural and quality backlinks will boost your SEO ranking by quite a bit. But why?
The answer is very simple. Internal links allow the engine and the users to reach the relevant pages on your website more quickly. This improves navigation as well as indexing but also boosts the value of each individual link. Links, on their own, have little value to the engine, but, many links act cumulatively, increasing the value of a website, making it easier to map out. As for external links, linking to pages with high ranking and authority on the search engine, as well as having them link to you boosts your relevancy and makes the engine put your website forward as more representative of the searcher’s needs.
Conclusion
And, with that, we’ll wrap up this little guide of ours. These are some of the most common suggestions to boost your SEO, but there are many more out there. Feel free to extend your research, as being properly informed or the latest trends and techniques will give you an edge over your competition.
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