Tips for Building a SEO Friendly Website
If you’ve ever built a website for your business, you’ve most likely heard about the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO helps your business to be found organically through search engine results. A website with great SEO techniques set in place has the potential to reach more customers, boost your sales, and grow your business. Sounds like something you’re looking for? Keep reading!
In this article, we’re going to give you a few tips for building an SEO-friendly website and help you understand some of the most important techniques for SEO.
On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization, or on-page SEO, consists of optimizing your web pages so that they will rank higher and earn more traffic that is relevant from organic search results. When appearing on a search engine results page (SERP), your website content will be scanned for keywords to determine relevance. Search engines like Google, for example, are looking for the most relevant results to display, so their algorithms will search/crawl the content on your site for not only essential keywords, but also similar terms that can be used in conjunction with that keyword.
Some important elements of on-page optimization are your title and header tags. Title tags should be used to give a brief description of what your website page content is about. Our title for this article is “Tips for Building a SEO Friendly Website”. It is simple, to the point, and lets you know what you can find in this marketing blog.
Next are header tags, which can be described as “subpoints” or “subsections”. Header tags can be categorized as H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. with H1 – the title – being at the top of the hierarchy. Another way Google finds content to display on the SERP is by crawling web pages, or using bots to analyze your website content. It will analyze text, images, and other SEO-significant elements to determine what the page is about. When you use header tags, you’re signalling to the Google bots that the text is important and relevant to the topic. When writing your headers, make sure they are concise and relevant to what your web page is about.
Off-Page Optimization
Off-page optimization contains methods that improve your SERP ranking outside of your web pages. These methods help Google and other search engines deem your website as trustworthy and authoritative. Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO is typically not in the web page publisher’s control. Despite this, there are ways that you can earn a higher SERP ranking through off-page SEO – and keywords play an important role in this as well!
Backlinks are a critical part of off-page optimization. With backlinks, it is all about quality over quantity. In order to have your website be seen as trustworthy, your backlinks must come from a fellow trustworthy site. But, what are backlinks? Backlinks, commonly referred to as inbound links, are links from one website to a page on another website. To build more backlinks for your site, try writing frequent blog posts with up-to-date information and statistics on your industry that other websites could cite and link back to your website.
Visual Appearance
You might think that the visual appearance of your website isn’t that important to being SEO-friendly, but a website that is visually appealing, represents your brand well, and is consistent with the look and feel of your business will help to improve your ranking on search engine results.
Have you ever clicked on a bad site and then immediately left to go to another website that was better looking? Search engines take into account the bounce rate on a website and the amount of time users spend on a site. If a website appears to be out-dated or looks untrustworthy, users will be quick to leave. This is why it’s important to continuously update your website and its content.
Responsive Web Design
Similar to visual appearance, your web design should be responsive across all devices. Majority of the time, people are using their mobile devices to search for businesses. If your website is only responsive to computers, they won’t be able to navigate your site easily and will be more likely to click off your site. When building your website, make sure you are testing how the site looks across all devices.
While there are many actions you can take to build an SEO-friendly website, we have highlighted just a few in this article. At Zellus Marketing, we are SEO experts – after all, we’re the top search result when you Google “Huntsville Marketing”, and have been for years. Ready to improve your website’s SEO? Fill out our contact form to receive a free consultation with our SEO team.
