The Importance of a SEO Friendly Website
A great website design is important to any business trying to find success online, but if a website doesn’t have a chance at good search rankings, very few people may ever get to see it. To avoid having a website that is not search engine friendly, you simply need to take into consideration some basic SEO principles and good content development practices.
SEO is crucial for all business in order to find success and being found on Google. It is very simple to incorporate good SEO practices into web designing so that all websites created can eventually rank. Below are 7 SEO practices that are often overlooked. However these can highly impact your website into ranking on Google.
Blog Posts
Adding blog posts to any site allows you to add fresh content easily and regularly. This technique works for literally any industry to assist your rankings, whether they are an online auto parts store or a local restaurant.
Search engines love fresh content and if you maintain blogs up to date on at least a weekly basis, you will be achieving a distinct SEO advantage. Blogs naturally attract search engine traffic and you can take advantage of this by not only adding content as often as possible, but to allow visitors to ask questions or leave comments.
Service Pages
A common mistake we often come across is that all services are placed into a single page on your website as it is faster and efficient option. This however will damage your SEO incredibly.
It is crucial that each different service or product has a specific and unique page in order to rank. This is also helpful if you have a range of different locations. It is SEO friendly to have a separate page for each one of your locations. This way, you may rank for different areas depending on where your customers are coming from.
Unique Content
Google ranks the relevance of each different website according to the content it contains, therefore new content is always preferred by search engines. This means that the content of every page needs to be completely different not just from any other site on the Web, but also any other page on the same site.
This raises the issue of duplicate content, something no body likes. Therefore, if you publish any content which has been duplicated and it appears somewhere else on the Internet, you run the risk of being ignored by search engines because the algorithm will be looking for content which is unique, allowing your site to stand out.
URLs
Having descriptive URLs can impact the relevance of your website massively. Search engines prefer that your website is easy to crawl. The best URLs contain keywords that help describe the content of the page.
For example, think about the following URLs for a construction website:
- constructioncompany.com/services/repairs/
- constructioncompany.com/services/residential-repairs/
The above URLs are excellent for SEO as they explain to the user where they are on the website and what the content is about. The following are poorly executed URLs which will lower your website’s ranking.
- constructioncompany.com/services/repairs-final-version/
- constructioncompany.com/hvacrepairsforcommercialcompanies
- constructioncompany.com/HVACrepairs4CommercialCompanies
Mobile Responsive
Mobile phones in 2020 are the most useful devices to conduct research and browse through websites. We live in a present world where everybody owns a mobile phone and they are extremely easy to access and utilise. Sites optimised for search engines should give equal consideration to the mobile layouts of their websites (rather than just bolting on simple responsive website design).
To create a truly mobile-friendly design and maximise results from mobile search, you must think of the needs and wants of mobile users. What a user will do on a phone is often far different from what they will do on a computer. And even if your conversions tend to be on a desktop, that crucial first touch may well be on mobile.
Website Speed
Google has indicated site speed is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages and this could negatively affect your indexation. Also it is been studied that half of all users will leave a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
In order to improve a website’s speed there are a few factors which must be perfected. These include optimising images, reducing the servers response times, leveraging browser cache and eliminating render blocking JavaScript and CSS.
PDFs
Having PDFs on your website is huge common mistake. It is easy to add into the website an it look great, however you cannot rank for any keywords listed in the PDF. This is due to Google not being able to crawl through images and the content they contain. You also cannot track actions by customers on a PDF, which means your goals and conversions cannot be determined.
For instance, you are a restaurant owner and your menu is in PDF format as it is an efficient method. However, if you have 50 dishes in your menu, those 50 dishes will never rank on search engines when potential customers are looking for them.
In conclusion, these 7 SEO friendly website tips are crucial and they definitely determine your future rankings on search engines such as Google. These techniques and strategies as such should always be applied when first creating a website so that it begins ranking as soon as it is set live.