10 Major Factors to Make Your Website Search Engine (SEO) Friendly
Website is one of the most important parts of your digital brand. It has to be clean and meaningful. Furthermore, if you want to take benefit of the best SEO services practiced by your SEO agency of in-house SEO expert, you need to make sure the website is search engine friendly. If your website is not SEO friendly, then it will be a tough task to get it on the top rankings for the targeted keywords. In this article, I will share top 10 factors you need to keep in mind to keep your website SEO friendly and leverage maximum benefits from your SEO campaigns. Also, I will share some tips that you can apply to make your website SEO friendly.
What is SEO Friendly Wesite?
It is important to understand what an SEO friendly website is before getting into details of its major factors and related tips.
An SEO friendly website is the website that follows the best practices of SEO. Yes! That’s it! The important thing is the benefits of an SEO friendly website.
Key benefits of SEO friendly website:
- It gets easily found
- It gets easily crawled
- It gets easily indexed
- It uses crawl budget assigned to the website wisely
- It protects the site from search engine penalties
- It pushes off page SEO
- It helps in increasing ranks
- It contributes in increasing SEO benefits
Now, as you understand what is an SEO friendly website and its top benefits, you must have understood its worth. This is the time to dive deep into the 10 major factors that make website search engine aka SEO friendly along with the tips that you can apply to make your website search engine friendly to leverage above mentioned benefits.
1. Use SEO friendly Content
Content plays an important part in your web marketing campaigns. There are many people who put copied content on the website to make it live quickly or get the cheap content or write everything on their own. Even if you are a great writer, you might not know the nitty gritty of writing SEO friendly content, which has a perfect use of keywords with the application of some more SEO standards. Also, the sections of the webpage should be well defined. You better use service of a writer that know SEO content writing or learn it before start writing. Keep in mind, thin content and duplicate content will bring penalties, called Panda penalty, to your website. On the contrary, good content will get various SEO benefits.
Explore more details about the SEO friendly content.
2. Keep Important HTML Tags Wisely
Your webpage should use certain important HTML tags such as,
- Header tags to put headings effectively and get related SEO benefits
- Canonical to assure that the search engines always know which is the right copy of your webpage. It also resolves the problem of having multiple URL for the same webpage that can considered as duplicate content by the search engines.
- Title and Meta Description to take benefit of SEO rankings.
- Alt tag to optimize images to get image search related benefits.
There are many other HTML tags that can be used to optimize the website, but it has to be used wisely. You should hire an experienced SEO Specialist or an SEO agency to optimize website with these HTML tags to get correct use and benefits of it or you should master it first.
3. Keep Code Clean
Restrain from using fancy animations, iframes and complex coding as often searchbots either can’t read these or will ignore it. Also, the complex coding will waste the crawling budget of your site. So always use the best coding practices. Remove unnecessary codes instead of putting it in the comment and avoid common development mistakes.
4. SEO friendly Navigation
The navigation plays an important role in getting the website crawled as well as getting top rankings. To make use of this SEO factor, divide your website in a hierarchical link structure. The main services must be your main pages and then its child pages. Defining effective link structure is easy as well as a complex task. Thus, spend required time and resources to define correct link structure. This hierarchical link structure should be part of your main menu. Also, you can use footer to put important links and get some more interesting SEO benefits. However, you have to be cautious while using footer links.
5. Use SEO friendly URL
The URLs are one of the most important parts of SEO. These URLs should be SEO friendly. An ideal web URL in SEO is a static URL with important keywords in it. However, it shouldn’t be too long or too short.
6. Be careful about ads
If you are using ads on the website, you need to be careful about it. The search engines have it own rules of putting effective ads without losing SEO benefits. For example, these ads shouldn’t block content in any ways. Also, the ads shouldn’t have sneaky redirects. It shouldn’t be on top of the page.
7. Keep website size low and loading speed high
Your website should load as fast as possible. The ideal load time for a website is 2 seconds at maximum. For this your website size needs to be low. You can use compressed images, cache, no heavy videos, etc. to keep website low size that can load faster.
8. Website has to be mobile friendly
Being one of the ranking factors, it is the most important part of SEO friendly website. Your website must be responsive, so it can provide the best user experience for the mobile users as well. From content to images, everything has to be mobile friendly.
9. Don’t play with things
Always keep in mind, being an SEO expert is not a game. By reading some articles you can’t become an SEO Specialist and that’s okay as your expertise is hard, too, for anyone to learn. Learning SEO needs years of experience and devotion. The reason for sharing this honest truth is that you mustn’t do what you don’t know because SEO is like playing with fire. If you don’t do it correctly, you will invite penalties. Thus, I always say, “Doing no SEO is better than doing wrong one.”
10. Keep optimizing website
The website optimization is a one time process, but not actually! It is the first milestone of your journey in the digital world. As and when you add a new webpage, blog post or make certain changes, the website needs to be optimized again. If there are some algorithmic changes introduced in the SEO industry, the website needs to optimize again. Of course, once the website is optimized the future website optimization processes will be shorter and faster. The important thing is to keep optimizing it to match your pace with the changes. However, be cautious. Don’t make changes too frequently as it can adversely affect.
These are 10 major factors you must keep in mind to make your website SEO aka Search Engine friendly. Hope this helps. If you are looking for a trustworthy SEO company that knows the nitty gritty of this complex universe of SEO or want to get SEO friendly web development services, get in touch.
About Author: Ash Vyas
Ash Vyas has 10+ years of practical experience in digital marketing and international business development. She has written 100s of articles on various topics to live her passion of helping people with her knowledge and expertise. In addition to directing Digital Marketers India, Ash also delivers keynote sessions and holds key positions in some international companies as a consultant, director of operations and mentor.
