Marketing has changed a lot over the decades. Many businesses are moving towards online advertising and promotions via digital marketing techniques.
The very first thing that comes to notice on the web is your business website, which is kind of a home to your online business model, where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in ensuring your website ranks and is well-adjusted to search engines like Google, Bing, etc.
Yet, so many small and local business owners make the mistake of not creating an SEO friendly website. This might be for lack of awareness or any other reasons.
So, How to Build a SEO Friendly Website? In this blog let’s explore various key elements that define an SEO-friendly website and how can you easily implement this while your website is in the development stage.
Long ago, SEO was about keyword research, backlinks (or off-page SEO), and some on-page but in today’s competitive online environment, it encompasses various aspects of your website’s structure, design, user experience, and content quality.
5 Steps to SEO friendly Website
Here are 5 simple steps you can do while your website is in the development stage so that your website is search engine compatible.
Step 1: Focus on Website Structure
One of the initial stages of SEO is focusing on website structure.
If your goal is to get traffic and conversion from your website then having a well-structured website can hugely benefit you.
Image Credit: Website Architecture @SEMrush
Don’t just create a website but focus on certain areas that can hugely benefit your SEO. Such as keeping the website structure clean.
1. Create Your Main Pages:
- Homepage
- Contact Us
- About Us
- Main Services/Products page (for e-commerce sites)
This defines the initial structure of your website. This is important for SEO, it builds trust, provides valuable information, and enhances user experience.
2. Create Collection or Service Pages:
The next important thing to do is create your important service pages or collection pages depending on your intent of the website. And for obvious reasons.
- Collection & Sub-collection Pages (E-commerce)-
- Categorize your products logically.
- Use clear and descriptive subcategories.
- Service Pages (Service Websites) –
- Highlight your services with detailed descriptions.
- Include customer testimonials, if possible.
As mentioned in the beginning, if your intent is online sell through your website. It is important to create these pages with much information about your service or products.
This helps SEO, and search engines can find your internal pages or webpages easily.
3. Blog Category & Tags (Taxonomies):
- Organize your blog content into relevant categories.
- Use tags to improve content discoverability.
We have seen so many sites with similar issues that they don’t have a clear or avoid creating a taxonomy. This helps SEO and enhances user experience. Users can easily access your content depending on their needs and search engine bots can clearly understand the content of it.
- Examples of bad taxonomy – “Best SEO Company”, “Top marketing company in LA”, etc.
- Examples of good taxonomy – “SEO Basic”, “AI Tools For Graphic Design”, etc.
Step 2: Simple But Must-Do Implementation
These are simple implementations that you do while building an SEO friendly website.
1. Add Site Favicon
A favicon is a small icon that appears in browser tabs, bookmarks, and search results next to your website’s name. These are not directly a ranking factor but play a role in SEO mainly through improving user experience and brand recognition, it adds professionalism and credibility to your site.
2. Create and add Robots.txt File to your site root directory
The Robots.txt file is important in SEO because it guides search engine crawlers on how to interact with the pages and content of your website. By specifying which areas of the site should or shouldn’t be crawled, it helps search engines efficiently index your website.
3. Add XML Sitemap
Having an XML sitemap makes it easier for search engines to find your web pages. It ensures that search engines can discover and index all relevant pages, even those that might not be discoverable through the normal crawling process.
4. Add Your Site to Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster
Google and Bing both provide a free tool to monitor website performance and address issues. This can be used as an SEO tool to check search visibility, indexing, mobile usability, and more from a single tool.
This again is not an SEO factor, but it helps to improve your SEO strategies.
Tip – You can easily submit an XML sitemap to these tools so that search bots can crawl from time to time.
5. Add Google Analytics 4
Adding Google Analytics 4 or GA4 to your site enables you to monitor user’s activity.
GA4 provides advanced tracking and analytical capabilities, giving deeper insights into user behavior and website performance.
GA4’s focus on user-centric metrics and predictive analytics helps in understanding how users interact with a website, which pages perform best, and where improvements are needed.
This again is not an SEO factor, but it helps to improve your SEO strategies and SEO Metrics for the new website.
Step 3: Design and User Experience (UX)
In recent years website design and user experience have played a vital role in ranking a website. Major search engine Google has focused on user experience. Read this article.
Google in the year 2021 introduced Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor for a website. Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience.
Core Web Vitals measures –
1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – This is the time it takes for the main content of a page to load. A good LCP is considered to be 2.5 seconds or faster.
2. First Input Delay (FID) – This is the time from when a user first interacts with your site (i.e., when they click a link or tap on a button) to the time when the browser can respond to that interaction. A good FID is less than 100 milliseconds.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – It helps in quantifying the amount of unexpected layout shifts of visual page content. A good CLS score is less than 0.1.
To achieve a good user experience you can focus on –
1. Website Design
- Focus on a clean, modern, and visually appealing design
- Use responsive design for a consistent experience on all devices
2. Accessibility
- Ensure your website is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.
- Follow accessibility guidelines such as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)
3. User Interaction
- Analyze how users interact with your website using tools like heatmaps
- Optimize user flows and user experience based on data
4. Website Speed
- Improve website loading times to enhance user experience
- Compress images and use efficient coding practices
- Minimize CSS and JavaScript blocking time
5. Friendly Navigation:
- Implement user-friendly navigation menus
- Ensure a clear and intuitive menu structure
Ensuring your website has a good user experience, the website is considered as an SEO friendly website.
Step 4: Keyword Research & Optimization
Keywords are fundamental to any SEO strategy. It helps users to find your content whenever a query is made.
While in the web development stage or new website, you can create a list of queries that you think the user uses to search. Using the list and keyword analysis tool you can check if the keyword is best suited for you.
By applying those keywords to your website content, you make the site SEO friendly for search engines.
Here’s a few tips –
1. Look for the Keyword Volume metric – It tells the popularity or frequency of searches for a particular keyword in search engines. It indicates how many people are searching for that specific term.
The higher the better.
Useful Read: What is Keyword Research in SEO?
2. Use synonyms and variations of the keyword – It provides a more comprehensive understanding of your content.
3. Avoid Keyword Stuffing – Don’t add the same keyword multiple times. Use keywords naturally within your content, avoiding overuse.
Step 5: On-Page SEO Optimization
On-page SEO can help you optimize a single webpage to ensure your webpages are search engine compatible.
It involves optimizing both the content and HTML source code of a page, it focuses on Keyword Optimization, Content Quality, Meta Tags, URL Structure, Internal Linking, and Heading tags.
On initial web development, by effectively applying on-page SEO techniques, you can enhance the relevance, accessibility, and user-friendliness of your web pages, which are key factors in achieving higher search engine rankings and attracting more organic traffic.
Must read: What is On-Page SEO?
Here are some tips –
1. Friendly URL Structure
- Create descriptive and keyword-rich URLs
2. Heading (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
- Include primary keywords in H1 tags (within the first 30 characters)
- Maintain a logical hierarchy of heading tags
3. Meta Title and Description
- Craft compelling meta titles and descriptions using relevant keywords naturally
For WordPress and Shopify sites you can use SEO plugins or apps like –
- Plug In SEO, SEO Manager for Shopify
- Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, Rank Math, and The SEO Framework for WordPress
Ensure To Build A SEO Friendly Website
These are the 5 steps you can implement during the early development stage of your website especially for small and local businesses.
These 5 steps will ensure you build an SEO friendly website that is compatible with search engine ranking.
Do remember, SEO is not a one-time thing, if your goal is to get clients or sell using your website then it requires constant attention, content updates, adding new content, and adaptation to search algorithm changes and user behaviors.
But ensuring an SEO Friendly Website while building a website provides a better compatibility and competitive edge against your competitors.
