In today’s digital age, A website is crucial for every business or organization to get visibility and succeed online.
However, having a website is not just enough. The important thing is, you need to make your site SEO Friendly to get organic traffic to your website.
So, In this article, I have provided key factors on how to make SEO Friendly website and tips to improve your website’s SEO.
Now, without wasting a second. Let’s jump into the guide.
What is an SEO-Friendly Website?
An SEO-Friendly website is all about optimizing your website for search engines to improve its visibility and ranking on SERPs to get targeted traffic to your website.
Your website should be designed in a way that focuses on search engines as well as users in mind.
In simple, an SEO-friendly website is not only optimized for search engine crawlers but also should provide a great user experience by making it easy to navigate, having relevant quality content, and being mobile friendly.
Now, Let’s explore the key factors and tips for making an SEO-friendly website.
How To Make Your Website SEO Friendly
In creating an SEO-friendly website, several factors contribute to its optimization. These factors can be broadly categorized into three categories. They are
- Page Speed
- Mobile Responsive
- On-Page Optimization
Firstly, before taking you through each category. Let me give you clarity about the recent Google update.
As Google recently released, Page Experience, Page speed, mobile friendliness, and Secure sites are ranking signals used in their systems to rank a website on Google. All these four signals matter not only for Google, but also matters when you think of it from a user perspective view.
For example, if your website is loading very slowly and is not mobile-friendly, the user definitely will not have a good positive experience on your site.
If there is no great user experience, the user will bounce back and will look for other sites on the internet, the other sites will mostly be your competitor’s sites, which indirectly will affect your website rankings and business.
And also, Google announced some changes in its helpful content documents guide which also includes a good overall page experience. You can go through the article on seoroundtable.
So moving forward, there is no need to worry about changes that google made, when you think from the user perspective, all are crucial to optimize and make a good SEO Friendly website.
Now, Let me take through each step to make your site SEO Friendly.
1. Page Speed
Page Speed is one of the most crucial factors to make your site SEO Friendly. It refers to how fast your website loads.
It is crucial because it affects the user experience and search engine rankings. And websites that load faster are more likely to rank higher on Google SERP than those that load slowly.
And Search engines like Google prioritize websites that provide a good user experience and it is on of the ranking factors.
Tips to improve the page speed of your website
Compress Images
Mostly, images are the first thing that will significantly slow down your website, so you need to look at those images and optimize them to decrease the load time.
You can optimize the images by compressing the image file size without affecting the quality of the image.
Ensure that each image size on your website is less than 100kb, So it will help your images load quickly and improves the page speed.
And, you can compress the images with many online compression tools out there in the market. And I use shortpixel to compress the images, and I also recommend trying it.
Choose a Quality Hosting
The hosting provider will play a major role in your website management and performance including your page speed.
Web hosting is the place where all the files of your live website will be stored, on the internet.
And whenever the user requests something related to your website, the hosting server will check the files and responds back to the user with the results on the user’s browser.
So, it’s important to choose fast and reliable hosting for your website so that your website will get quality features and increases performance, and also improves user experience.
Do not settle for cheap hosting where it impacts your page performance, It means some of the hosting providers offer resources between multiple sites and make the server overloaded which results in poor performance and affects the loading speed of the site.
So, there are many hosting service providers out there, choose the best one as per your website type and also the budget that you can invest.
If you ask me, this site “seovishnu” is hosted on Cloudways, if you have a budget you can go for Cloudways which is the best and fast. Otherwise, you can go for Hostinger which is budget friendly with good features. And, there are other hostings such as Siteground, Dreamhost to choose, but that depends on your own research and budget.
Enable Caching
Caching is another crucial process that you need to look at to make your website load faster and to make your site SEO- Friendly.
It is a technique used to improve the performance and speed of the website. It allows the browsers to store your website data, such as images file, CSS files, and Javascript files, on the user’s or visitors’ computer or mobile.
And, the stored data can be retrieved and reused if a user visits the multiple times to the website by reducing the download of the data from the web server again.
This process helps speed up the website’s loading time without putting a heavy load on the servers.
And using various caching plugins is a common practice for websites, especially those built on Popular CMS like WordPress.
W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache, are some of the cache plugins that can help you enable caching on your website.
The above plugins provide you with user-friendly settings and configurations to enable different types of caching, including browser caching, server-side caching, and CDN caching, depending on your website requirements.
Minimize HTTP Requests
Minimizing HTTP requests is another crucial process in optimizing your website’s performance and improving its loading time.
Let me give you some clarity when a user visits a web page on your website, the user browser sends a request to your web server(hosting) to fetch various files such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and other files to make your web page visible on the browser.
Therefore, these requests together will increase the loading time of your website, and the browser has to wait for the server to respond before it can continue rendering the webpage for each request.
Here are a few tips for minimizing HTTP requests.
Combine & Minify CSS and Javascript
It’s crucial to combine & minify CSS and Javascript files to reduce the loading time.
This process of removing unnecessary spaces, Comments, and other characters from the code from CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files is called minification.
And, Combining CSS and Javascript is to combine all CSS requests into 1 CSS file and all Javascript requests into 1 JS file.
Doing the above activities will help to reduce HTTP requests and will increase the loading speed of your website.
You can automatically combine & minify CSS and Javascript files by using the optimization plugins mentioned above in the page speed section.
Remove Unnecessary Plugins and Scripts
We know that many websites use a lot of plugins and external scripts to enhance the functionality and design of a website.
Therefore, using many unnecessary plugins and scripts can lead to a decrease in the page load a user experience.
And using too many plugins can add extra code in the backend and requires additional HTTP requests, which can impact your website loading time.
So, consider only using the plugins and resources that are necessary for your website functionality and design, and remove or avoid unnecessary ones.
2. Mobile Responsiveness
In this digital era, with the increase in the usage of mobile devices with 5G internet services out there, having a mobile-responsive website has become crucial for every business that wants to succeed online.
According to recent statistics from Statista, over 59.16 percent of global website traffic was generated as of 2022 from mobile devices
Hence it shows that making mobile responsive design is crucial for providing a positive user experience and making it SEO Friendly website.
Here are some tips for improving mobile responsiveness on your website
Use Responsive Design
Responsive design allows your website to adapt its layout and content automatically based on the user screen size of the device used to access your website.
It means whether the users are opening your website on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone, it will look good and function well on all those devices.
By making your website responsive design, users will have a positive experience and stay as long as they are on your website.
This gives a good indication to Google and helps to improve your rankings on SERP.
Many responsive design frameworks are available in the market for popular content management systems (CMS) like WordPress.
These frameworks provide pre-designed responsive templates and components that can be installed for your website and make it easier for responsive design implementation.
Optimize Images and Content for Mobile
Mobile devices have smaller screens and also slow internet speed compared to desktops.
So it is crucial in optimizing your images and content on your website for mobile devices.
The Optimization involves
- Compress the images without losing the quality of the images.
- Choose the right image format
- Reduce the amount of content size displayed on smaller mobile screens.
According to Google, 53% of mobile site visitors leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Therefore, optimizing your images and content for mobile can improve your website loading time and user experience on mobile devices.
Test Your Website for Mobile Devices
Testing your website on different mobile devices is important to ensure it displays correctly and functions well on various screen sizes.
According to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a website, if a website has trouble accessing on mobile devices.
Therefore, testing your website’s performance and usability on mobile devices and fixing issues if there are any errors is crucial to provide a better experience for your mobile users.
You can use online testing tools Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to test your website and identify any issues that need fixing.
3. On-Page Optimization
On-Page Optimization is also an important factor in making an SEO Friendly website.
It is the process that involves optimizing the Content and HTML code of your website to improve its ranking on the search engine results page (SERP).
Here are the On-page Optimization Tips
Use Unique and Relevant Title Tags
The title tag is one of the most important on-page elements that need to be optimized on your website.
For each web page on your website, you need to focus on creating a unique title tag, and it should be relevant to the content of the web page.
The length of the title tag can range between 50-60 characters, and it is recommended to include your target keyword in the title.
As a result, a well-optimized title tag helps Google to understand the context of the page and improves its visibility on search engine results pages.
Use Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are short descriptions that are displayed under the title tag on the search engine results page.
It provides the users with a summary of the complete web page information and allows the users to take action on SERP and enter your web page.
For each web page on your site, you need to write a meta description and it should be unique and eye-catching for the users to click on it and go to the page.
And, the length of meta descriptions can be up to 160 characters, and it is also recommended to include your target keyword in the description.
Keep a Clean URL Structure
URL is also known as a Uniform Resource Locator, which refers to the address of the web page.
Keep the URL structure clean as you can. The best practices for clean URLs are
- Keep it short and descriptive with all lower cases.
- The length of the URL can be up to 75 characters.
- You can use hyphens (-), underscores (_), or Pluses (+) to separate the words in the URL. ( Hyphens or preferable).
And also, make sure to include target keywords to make it SEO- Friendly.
Create Unique Content
Creating unique content is crucial to make your website SEO Friendly and building trust among your audience.
We know that content is king, and especially when it comes to SEO you should provide high-quality content that meets the needs of your target audience.
Ensure your content is unique and not plagiarized, as it could negatively impact your website’s SEO performance.
Additionally, your content should be well-written, and engaging and needs to increase the readability of users that provides value to your target audience.
Here are a few tips you can consider while creating content.
- Avoid using long paragraphs in your content
- Break them down into short paragraphs
- Use bullet points in between the content
- Include infographics or images in between the content as a visual presentation.
In this way, the users can go through your content and grab the concepts easily, and also it will help users to engage with your content.
And, Google also prioritizes the pages that fulfill users’ needs and for a positive experience.
Use Keywords Strategically
Keywords are most important in On-Page Optimization to make your website SEO-friendly because they help Google understand the content’s relevance and topic.
After finding the keywords through keyword research and creating content on those keywords, you need to focus on the keyword placement in the content.
The placement of keywords is crucial in your Content for SEO. Search engines like Google will give more weight to the pages if keywords are placed in the right positions and frequently.
So, It’s important to ensure that keywords are placed naturally and meaningfully by avoiding keyword stuffing in your content.
In this way, it will enhance the readability and value of your content to the users and helps to make it SEO Friendly website.
Optimize Header Tags
Header tags are one of the most important elements in On-Page optimization, used to structure your content on a web page and make it easy for search engines and users to read.
These heading tags are denoted from H1 to H6, while H1 is the highest and H6 is the lowest.
- Use H1 for the main heading, including your target keyword in it, which will describe the overall topic of the content.
- And H2- H6 for subheadings to structure and break the content into sections.
- Use H2 as a main subheading and H3 and H4 as a sub-section within the subheadings.
Consider using Primary keywords in the H1 tags and secondary keywords, LSI keywords in H2 or H3 tags to optimize your content for users and search engines.
It’s also important to follow the logical hierarchy while using header tags; this helps to create a clear and organized structure for your content, making it more user Friendly and SEO Friendly.
Optimize Internal Linking
Internal linking is one of the crucial processes in On-Page activities. Internal links act as bridges between web pages of the same website.
The role of Internal links determines the importance of the related pages within the site and helps Google to understand your website architecture easily.
It helps users to navigate from one page to another page, by providing the context of the content through the anchor text.
Therefore, try to use Internal links strategically and always links to the related web pages to build the authority of the site and make your website SEO friendly.
So, these are the 3 categories you need to focus on to make an SEO-friendly website that will help your website to get visibility and rank on the search engine results pages.
Read about : What is Blogging and how to start a blog
Why it is Important to have an SEO Friendly website?
Now, that you know how to make SEO friendly website, Let’s see why it’s important to have an SEO-friendly website for your business.
It helps in increasing organic traffic
A website that is well-optimized for search engines and as well as users will be more likely to get rank higher on search engine result pages (SERP).
If your website ranks higher on SERP, your website will get more visibility to your target audience, which leads to organic traffic to your website.
Organic traffic refers to visitors who visit your website through organic results on Google without paid advertising. And, the top number 1 organic result gets approximately 32% of all clicks.
Improves User Experience
Having an SEO Friendly website also provides a positive user experience, such as an easy-to-navigate, visual appearance layout with relevant and high-quality content.
So, when visitors have a smooth or positive experience on your website, it helps them to stay longer and engage with your content, which builds trust in your website and converts them into customers later.
Better Brand Visibility
A strong online presence is crucial for increasing brand awareness and recognition in your target audience in this digital era.
So, having an SEO-friendly website helps your website rank higher on SERP, increasing your brand visibility with potential customers.
When your website appears at the top of the search results, it builds trust and credibility among your target audience, resulting in more brand awareness and recognition.
Helps to beat Competitors
As we know, there is a lot of competition in every industry. And it’s important to know that your business needs to stand out from the competitors.
So, having SEO Friendly website helps you with a competitive edge by helping you rank higher on the search engine results page.
Therefore, when potential customers search for something related to your product or services, and when you appear on search results for those keywords, it increases your website’s visibility and drives traffic that leads to potential sales.
Cost Effective
SEO is a long-term strategy with low investment, which promotes your website 24/7 on the Internet.
Unlike paid advertising, you need to invest in an ongoing process which gives might give instant results but not for the long term.
An SEO Friendly website can bring continuous organic traffic to the site by improving your website ranking even after initial optimization is done.
It makes SEO a cost-effective approach with a higher investment return over time.
Conclusion
Now, it’s your turn, I have covered each point on how to make SEO friendly website, and it’s time to put your learning into implementation and make your website visible and rank on Google.
Creating an SEO-friendly website is crucial for every business or organization wanting to succeed online.
Since many optimization things come into SEO, the tips that I have shared should be done in priority to get attention from search engines and target audience to your website.
I hope this article is helpful and valuable, and if you have any queries, you can ask in the comments below. I want to read and reply.