As a business owner, a website allows you to ensure your online presence. It allows you to expand our market reach.
However, a business website has more and more to look beautiful. If you want it to rank for the right keywords, you should make it suitable for SEO.
Here are some ways to do this:
Make it Responsive
In the third quarter of 2020, mobiles account for 50.81% of worldwide Internet traffic. Therefore, you must have our website faster than ever before.
What is the purpose of a responsive web design? This allows you to provide a consistent experience, whether the site visitor is on a desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone. On the other hand, it gives visitors to your site a reason to be loyal to your brand. This is because you can use your site regardless of the screen size.
Optimize URL
Here are some quick tips:
- Be readable. Your page’s URL should be https://yourwebsite.com/blog-post-title.
- Keep it organized. Instead of https://mysite.com/blog-post-title/keyword/category, do the following: https://mysite.com/category/blog-post-title.
- Use hyphens instead of underscores.
- Remove closed words, such as, etc.
- Use the keyword. If your post is about building confidence, you can use /building-self-confidence.
Get user-friendly navigation.
As mentioned earlier, search engines prefer usable websites. You can achieve this with user-friendly navigation. What do we mean by “user-friendly navigation”? Each page of your site should be classified appropriately.
If it is a blog, it means posting in the same category. If you have an eCommerce site, it means that the product pages should be grouped. This makes it easy for visitors to your site to see what they are looking for. Otherwise, they will leave the site randomly.
Increase page load speed
Another way for a website suitable for SEO is to improve its page loading speed. If you’re wondering why speed is necessary, here are some quick stats:
- If the website takes more than four seconds to load, then 1 out of every four visitors leave.
- If your e-commerce site lacks user experience, 6 out of 10 online shoppers will shop elsewhere.
- Every second delay in loading the page will reduce customer satisfaction by 16%.
- This means that it would be best if you always improve the page load time of your site. Fortunately, today’s web designers know how to prioritize functions before the forms.
Another great idea is to implement Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is an HTML framework that improves the loading method of your site on a mobile device.
Join social media
In 2018, HubSpot conducted an experiment that tested SEO results with and without social results. They found that content with significant social stakes is achieving a 22% increase in search rankings.
What does this mean? This means that you should incorporate social media in your web design. First of all, it allows visitors of your site to easily share your content with their network. Second, you let them expand their audience reach.
A simple trick to incorporate social media into your site is to add social sharing buttons to your content. But make sure you create content that forces them to shares your contact with their friends and family. As mentioned earlier, websites with significant social media promotions achieve higher search engine rankings.
Whether you start from scratch or improve your search engine rankings on the web, you will never run out of ideas.
The suggestions above may seem simple, but they are an integral part. When building a search engine-friendly website, it is like your foundation. This will ensure that it appears next to relevant search results.
It doesn’t matter if you have a great-looking website if people don’t do things on your website. Moreso, if they can’t come across it.
In summary, here are five design tips that can help you get a website suitable for SEO:
- Responsiveness matters.
- Optimize URL,
- User-friendly navigation.
- Increase page load speed.
- Join social media.
The key to creating a website that will fall in love with search engines is thinking about its functionality before creating a form.
Website Accessibility and Performance
Search engines will undoubtedly raise the bar of acceptable web standards. In 2018, Google announced the beginning of the transition to mobile indexing for the first time and expanded it by announcing mobile-first indexing of the entire web in 2020. Website performance and reach include user-centric metrics that can ultimately affect SEO.
The performance of the website captures the path of the user and marks various moments in the user’s experience. Below are important performance metrics.
First Contentful Paint (FCP) measures the time taken from the beginning of a page to the load of any piece of page content to display.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time a page begins to load until the largest text block or image element is pulled onto the screen.
First Input Delay (FID): measures the time a user interacts with your site for the first time (i.e., when they click a link, click a button, or a custom JavaScript-driven control) until the browser is actually able to respond. For that conversation.
Time to Interactive (TTI) measures the time a page starts loading when it is rendered visually, its initialization script (if any) is loaded, and it responds reliably to user input.
Total blocking time (TBT) measures the total time interval between FCP and TTI when the main thread was blocked for long enough to prevent input responsiveness.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the outcome of any unexpected layout shift that occurs between the start of page loading and a hidden change in the state of its lifecycle.
Sitemap
Sitemaps are a way to tell Google what it should do when it tries to index your site. Think of it as an old phone book that makes it easy for Google to index all your pages. Google likes sitemaps.
If Google cannot find a sitemap, it will have to crawl your site through the available links, which means that if your site’s area is not accessible through the link (which is harmful in itself), such Pages won’t be indexed without a sitemap.
Google also wants to see XML sitemaps. Most CMS systems can create their own sitemaps automatically, or you can use a plugin to generate them. You don’t really need to create one manually because there are too many plugins, but you can verify that your tool is using a checker like this here, or only by visiting Google Webmaster Tool.
If you verify your sitemap and want to indicate to Google that you are ready to index, you can submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. If you have spent a lot of time redesigning your site and are ready to go, this is a significant step.
Depending on the design of your site, you may also consider creating a sitemap for HTML. These maps are for humans. HTML sitemaps are useful for sites with too much dynamic content because they provide a list of all pages hierarchically on the site, helping some visitors for faster navigation.
However, if you are creating an HTML sitemap, you will need to describe each page briefly. This does not let Google think that you are building a link farm. If you have an extensive sitemap, you can divide it into several pages by main categories. Your XML sitemap can also be a useful template for a separate HTML sitemap.
Robots.txt, canonical tags, and paging
Google hates duplicate content, but some sites, such as e-commerce sites, often have multiple links to the same information. The old way to do this is to use a robots.txt file, but there are problems with it.
Suppose you have two URLs that link to the same content, and you have external sites that link to both pages. If you tell Google not to index one of the sites, the crawler will not measure the value of links coming to the blocked site.
Google and other search engines have come up with a solution called a canonical tag. The canonical tag will tell the checker that a copy of the content with that tag is correct, and basically all external links to the desired page pass the link juice. Canonical tags are required for email. Shopping sites that often have the same or almost the same information (think of product filtering) in many places.
These are not the only options, but they are suitable for most sites. Robots.txt and canon tags are related to the larger topic of pages or how your content is distributed across many pages of your site. This step is a bit tricky, but it is very important to make sure that you are not penalized for duplicate content on your site.