As a website owner or a marketer, you need to understand the importance of SEO, search engine optimization.
The factors influencing SEO, why it is needed and the benefits it brings with it are all part of achieving a better functioning website.
You would have heard the terms SEO and search engine friendly many times.
To begin with, it is important to understand that they both are totally different in nature from each other.
A search engine friendly website also needs to achieve high search engine ranking.
It generally includes the technical aspects of website design and development to achieve it.
Even if you think of designing your website with creatively to stand out in the crowd, you cannot compromise on the search engine friendly nature of your website.
Keeping in the importance it brings with it, you may end up changing various aspects and designs of your website.
Further, we will discuss the meaning of a search engine friendly website and what are the factors affecting it.
What is a Search Engine Friendly Website?
Search engine friendly website means that the search crawlers find the website of high quality, i.e. they find it easy and understandable.
There are few features which describe the quality of a search engine friendly website, few are given below:
1. Unique title and description:
Every page of your website which includes the homepage must have a unique title and description.
The good quality title and description signify that the keywords having been used wisely without stuffing it. The character for a title is between 60-65, meanwhile for description is about 320 characters.
2. Correct URL:
The URL of your webpage must be error-free and in lower case separated by dashes.
3. Page speed:
Fast loading website is highly SEO friendly and is well-liked by search crawlers. This generates better user interaction leading to newsletter signups and sales.
4. Original content:
Original or unique content is a must to make your website search engine friendly. It means that whatever content is written on your website must not be found anywhere else on the website or plagiarised in any form.
5. Optimized images on the website:
The images on your website are a good part of your content strategy. The images used should be optimized correctly,i.e. its size should be as per the set guidelines and the image file name should be relevant.
6. Meaningful webpages:
Your webpage should follow the standard structure to be search engine friendly. Below are the mentioned elements that are needed in the webpage:
- Header
- Breadcrumb
- Page title
- Well formatted text
- Author information
- Footer Note
SEO Friendly Website Design Guidelines:
Your website needs to be SEO friendly to achieve the desired ranking on the search engine.
The importance of the parameters needed in the SEO structure cannot be ignored for the good results.
The simple and correct use of tips and tricks for search engine optimization will make your website SEO friendly.
Below we will discuss a few SEO friendly website design guidelines:
1. Your website navigation should be simple:
For good website design, the navigation needs to be simple. Keep it simple with correct keywords for the crawlers to index them and easy for users to find it.
To keep the clear visibility of the navigation buttons for the human eye, it is advised to keep it on the top or bottom.
2. The right use of keywords:
Keywords are an important element that makes your website crawler friendly. These are required to be used in an appropriate way within the website without stuffing it with keywords.
Use long tail keywords which are liked by the crawlers and users find it easier to search with.
3. Use social media effectively:
Social media may not have a direct impact on your website but it does bring a lot of traffic to your website.
If the content on your website is good, then people will like and share it on various social media channels, which also acts as brand awareness of the website.
4. Include sitemap to your website:
A sitemap for a website is an easy way for the user to understand and find everything that is present on your website.
On the other hand, it helps the search engine to index the pages for higher ranking.
5. Removal of hidden text:
Hidden keywords or texts were used previously to achieve a higher search engine ranking.
In the current scenario, search engine algorithms are so sensitive that they can easily find out the use of these hidden texts.
If you are still using it then, it is good to remove such text as crawlers do not index such content and consider them as spam.
SEO Friendly Website Checker Tools:
Your website SEO is an important element to build your brand and get higher search ranking.
The complex algorithm offered by search engines checks if the website is worth renting or not.
If you get to know whether your website is SEO friendly or not, then it will make your job easier to make essential tweaks if needed.
We will talk about 5 SEO friendly website checker, which will help you to know if your website needs any changes.
1. Google Webmaster Tools:
It is a free tool offered by Google and is extremely user-friendly.
Google Fetch tool allows you to see as to how Google will perceive your website, the issues that may be there as per the Google search engine.
This information allows you to make necessary changes in your website design and content, to achieve better results.
2. Check My Links:
Check My Links is another free tool which is extremely popular among marketers.
Before you think of publishing your content live, use Check My Links to know if there are any broken links in your content. It is easy to use and provides highly effective results.
3. Moz Pro Tools:
It is a paid tool which delivers fairly accurate results. Moz provides many features that help you to check all the concerns related to your website.
It explains the SEO opportunity for your website, shows you the growth areas and build reports.
Moz Crawl tool is capable of analyzing more than 3000 links within few seconds and provides a detailed report for each page with the errors and opportunities to correct them.
This helps to understand if the content of your website can be easily crawled by the crawlers.
4. SEO report card:
An SEO report card is a free tool which compares your website SEO and friendliness as compared to your competitor’s website.
It provides you other relevant information like link building, rank analysis, on-site analysis, trust metrics, web accessibility and current indexing of your site.
5. Hubspot website grader:
Hubspot website grader helps businesses to identify the opportunities when it comes to search engine optimization.
It provides you the analysis based on website performance, the responsiveness of your website, SEO both on-page and off-page and security issues of your website.
Tips For Designing an SEO Friendly Website:
Google appreciates an SEO friendly website which provides their good user experience to the visitors.
There are many people who do not consider the importance of the website to be SEO friendly, yet it is an essential factor to achieve a good search engine ranking.
We will discuss a few tips to make your website SEO friendly while considering to design it.
1. Before you proceed to finalize the design of your website, which includes layout, colors, overall look and feel of your website, consult your web design and development team, to understand if this will be feasible for your website.
2. Breadcrumb navigation is a website structure which allows users to see how they landed on a page.
3. Each and every page on your website should be treated as an important landing page, and it should have complete information on it.
4. Your website template should be consistent across the website, this allows the user for easy navigation.
5. Text links are good for search engines and users, therefore, always use them at the footer of the navigation.
6. Use of horizontal scroll should be avoided as they are not user-friendly.
7. Your page loading speed should be fast to prevent from bounce rate and lower rankings.
8. While navigating a website, nobody likes the pop ads, hence, it should be avoided completely as it reduces the user experience.
9. Your website should follow the Google webmaster guidelines consistently for good user experience.
10. Always keep in mind to place your logo and primary message above for a good first impression to your user.
11. Your content needs to be grouped as per the relevance to each other and mention the descriptive information about it, for easy understanding of your user.
12. Having the right kind of content is important for your website to be search friendly. The text on your website should not be lengthy or prevent from using excessive keywords in it.
Use Keyword Analyser tool to check and correct such minor errors that may affect your website.
13. HTML headings are important for your website leading to better search engine ranking. Make use of these headings by using descriptive headlines.
14. The images on your website should follow the correct format, they should be supported by the website. The accepted file format is generally in gif, jpg or png.
15. The search crawlers read text present on the website. The images present on the page can also be indexed by these crawlers, for that you need to name the image rather than writing the text on the image itself.
16. Include a call to action texts and buttons in your website to encourage your visitors for the conversion.
17. The process of conversion is needed to be simple for your visitors to understand.
18. Keep your content engaging and make your website or blog interactive by adding a comment section to your page.
This encourages visitors to share their ideas and opinions and alternatively is another source for keywords to be mentioned in the comment section.
19. Social media buttons to your website encourage your content to be easily shareable.
20. Add descriptions to your images.
21. If your website is a multinational website, then keep a check on the content when translated into a different language. The space needed in other languages may vary from the space needed by English.
22. Your ad banners should have the space on the page with the correct dimensions.
23. Add plugins to the website, which helps in providing the relevant information about the page to the visitors.
24. Build a visually pleasing and user-friendly website to attract your audience and makes them spend more time on the site. This reduces the bounce rate and increases the average time on the website.
25. Use Javascript and Jquery plugins to achieve the effect of the flash.
26. Prevent from using flash as a part of your navigation.
27. Design your website to be responsive or user-friendly.
28. Use Javascript codes to improve your website and proves a good user experience. Prevent from overdoing the Javascript part as it may hamper the entire website experience.
29. The design should ideally fit in your standard screen size. Know what is the correct screen resolution and while designing your website, keep this information handy.
30. Ensure that you test your website on various browsers to know if they are functioning well.
We have discussed the various factors which can influence to make your website search engine friendly. To keep your website up and functioning requires constant effort and proficiency.
You need to regularly audit your website to see its performance, how it is working and if the results are not up to the mark then make necessary changes to it.
If you think it is not manageable, then it is advisable to hire some who can keep a track of such information because these steps are needed to keep your site up and running.