SEO Friendly Website

“Good SEO work only gets better over time. It is only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.”

- Jill Whalen, SEO Practitioner for last 20 years.

In today’s age of information and marketing, the website of the business is the key to the entire business. It is crucial for a business to make its website listed at higher position. A high-position website increases the visibility of the website to as many people as possible.

Why do I Need an SEO Friendly Website?

You can make your business website catchy and engaging, by maintaining a simple and aesthetically pleasant design. You can add relevant texts and images at appropriate places, use pleasant color schemes, etc. But while competing with the other parallel online businesses, making a pleasant and well-organized website is not sufficient to acquire higher rank. You need to make it search-engine friendly too.
Wendy Piersall, the Blogger and Speaker, says, Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first. A search engine should notice your website and enlist it at high rank.
To make it effective in terms of Search Engine Optimization, you need to add description about the content used on the web pages and use appropriate keywords.

Crawlers

The search engine such as Google sends crawlers (also called spiders or bots) to harvest the content on your website. Crawlers are nothing but programs which systematically browse the Internet for the purpose of web indexing. They cannot comprehend images or animations but can read their tags.
The crawler adds your web pages into the search engine’s database. You need people to find your website for the content they search for. To materialize this, you need to serve the content to the crawler in such format that it can interpret, analyze, and identify its relevance with users’ search query.
The crawler compares the information on the web page with the information it finds by itself. It executes various algorithms to check if the page is indeed relevant and ensure that you are not trying to fool the system using Black Hat SEO tactics to make your page rank higher.

Developing an SEO Friendly Website

In order to acquire high rank and make your website search-engine-friendly, you need to follow the given guidelines −

• Build a website that search engine can read and understand. Use the technology such as CSS.
• Create a sitemap to make search engine help discover every page of the website.
• Get links from trusted sources.
• Use Accurate keywords to get your page captured.
• Add Meta tags and text to your images.
• Make sure that your HTML code is error-free.
• Check and act upon for broken links. For example, 404 errors.
• Remove any hidden text.
• Do not plagiarize content from other websites. Keep original content.
• Keep the content up-to-date.

Basic Preparations

• Discuss website specifications with the web design and development team. Get a clear idea on content, organization of information, etc.
• Group and organize the content by relevance. Use menu items to help users find the information easily.

Page Design Aspects

• Place logo, taglines, and primary descriptions on the page to create the best possible first impression of the user.
• Avoid providing horizontal scroll bar.
• Use text links in footer. They support navigation and are very useful for both users and search engines.
• Use breadcrumb navigation to facilitate users to track their location within your website. It helps search engines to understand the structure of your website.
• Consider each page as a landing page providing all the information to the user. Guide the user for next appropriate actions
• Keep eyes on page loading time. A longer page loading time increases bounce rate and leads to lower ranking.
• Use appealing and relevant images in gif, jpg, or png formats that allow alt text support.
• Avoid pop-ups. They are annoying.
• Create an unavoidable, catchy, and informative landing page.

Content Optimizing Aspects

• Use html heading elements (H1 to H6) to include descriptive headlines and take advantage of their importance for the search engines.
• Use the Keyword Analyzer tool. Using long text and/or excessive keywords is not a good practice.
• If you want the text to be indexed, do not add it in images or animations.

Web Design and Marketing Aspects

• Use clear Call to Action to ask users to proceed for conversion.
• Keep the process of conversion as clear, simple, and unambiguous as possible so that user understands and converts.
• Use user interaction where required such as asking to comment or share.
• Incorporate social media buttons suit.
• For multilingual websites, the menu may require more space than it does for English.
• Reserve some space for advertise banners. You can use the standard sizes for banner Ads.

An attractive and user friendly design of website is more likely to attract the links, better ranking, reducing bounce rate, and increasing the average time on site.

Technical Aspects

• Avoid building complete websites in flash. Use JavaScript and jQuery plugins to bring out the same effects when possible. Do not excessively use it as some mobile devices cannot handle them correctly.
• Do not use flash for navigation.
• Ensure your website design fits to the standard screen resolution, typically 1024×768 pixels. Take the help of Google Analytics to know widely used screen resolutions.
• Test the website on various browsers to ensure it renders properly.
• Deactivate flash and other plugins to see the content as a search spider does. Alternatively you can use the Spider View feature of the Web SEO Analysis tool.