Basic Guideline for Search Engine Friendly Website

Basic Guideline for Search Engine Friendly Website

Your website is your gateway to reach your customers. The two most important things that you have to plan before designing and developing a website is how will your customers navigate the site and how will your customers find you.

Let’s tackle the first piece on designing a search engine friendly website. The most important page on your website is the homepage. This is the first page your users find and start navigating the site. How your navigation is laid out is of prime importance. Remember to structure the categories in a way that they are easy to find and browse.

Main Navigation

  • Bring the most important categories out
  • You can add sub-categories that are relevant to the main categories

Make sure your homepage provides the right messaging. Your users should be able to know what your website is about immediately from your homepage. Create unique and useful information to attract your visitors.

SEO FRIENDLY URLS

Write pages that clearly describe the topic. SEO friendly site goes hand in hand with the development of the site. Make sure that the URL is SEO friendly.

Example of SEO friendly URL

A non-friendly URL has characters that don’t make any sense

Basic Guideline for Search Engine Friendly Website

An SEO friendly URL has a clear path listed

Basic Guideline for Search Engine Friendly Website

A page title is very important for SEO and for your users. Keep it simple is the key. Title your page with a keyword that your user is searching for on the search engines. A title displays on your website url, and on search engines. A title describes the content of the page, and it is a best practice set by w3.org that each document must have a title tag.

The page title shows up on the url of your website:

Basic Guideline for Search Engine Friendly Website

 Add unique and related keywords

While creating a content for your website, make sure that you have researched what your users are looking for before creating a content. You can checkout Buzzsumo to analyze the content for any topic or competitor. Stay ahead of your competition and find out the latest trends, which topics are most shared and have backlinks.

Heading Tags

When you are writing content, make sure you are using h1, h2 till h6 headings. This shows Google which text is more important and what is the topic about. The headings tags helps rank your website better.

Internal Links

Internal links helps your user navigate to the relevant page quickly.  Add hyperlinks on your content to point to other pages of your website. Internal links are links within your website. Google follows links to track associations between links to and from of web content.

External Links

External links are links from other websites to your website or web pages or links from your website to other websites. Google follows links and this can have a tremendous impact on your domain rank. For example, a link from Forbes magazine to your website can generate traffic, and increase your page authority. Be careful with unethical link building. A black hat SEO shortcut can also get your website penalized by Google. Check out Ahrefs to analyze backlinks of your competitor or blog topics.

Clear Call to Actions

Call to actions are buttons or links that informs the user about a certain action. For e.g. Contact us, Call us, Subscribe to my email, buy now, view details are call to actions.

Things you should avoid:

  • Stuff keywords on your pages
  • Don’t use identical content under different URLs
  • Go off-topic

SEO Friendly Landing Pages

Remember that you know your consumer. When you work with a web development company, provide your list of must-haves. A website development company is an expert in developing a website but is not a specialist in your business. The more feedback you can give, the better ideas you will receive from your web development company.

Example of a good landing page

Basic Guideline for Search Engine Friendly Website