No matter how great your website looks in terms of design, if it doesn’t fetch any revenue for your business, it’s of no use.
So, if you are looking to grow your sales & revenue through your website, you must pay attention to its SEO (search engine optimization).
While it’s true that there are several SEO activities that can be done to optimize any website for search engines, it all starts from the website itself. In other words, if a website is well-coded for search engines, the half SEO battle is already won.
Now the question is “How can you optimize your website for search engines?“
In this blog post, we have shared 5 ways to make a website SEO-friendly.
Let’s have a look at them.
#1 Using meta tags
What are meta tags?
Meta tags are the invisible code snippets that provide some important data about your webpages to the search engines. Through this data, search engines can learn more about your services, products, or website contents.
When we talk about meta tags, the title & description tags are considered the most important of all.
Below are some tips to manage the description tags of your website:
- Make them compelling, concise, and informative.
- Do not exceed 160 words and do not keep them too short either.
- Create unique descriptions for each webpage.
- Use keywords appropriately.
#2 Taking care of accessibility
Is your website viewable on all kinds of browsers? If yes, you will have high chances of securing noticeable positions on search engines however if not, it may affect your SEO.
If your website has accessibility issues, there could be a possibility that a key image on your site may be missing an alt description. Or perhaps the headings on a page look right, but actually they are in the incorrect order.
If your website is not accessible on all the browsers properly, it won’t just damage your SEO, but it can also affect the user experience.
How to check a website’s accessibility?
There are many online tools such as Wave http://wave.webaim.org/ through which you can easily detect the accessibility issues on your website if any. Your website builder can help you to fix the accessibility issue on your site. It may be a small investment for you but it’s definitely worthwhile.
#3 Optimizing loading speed
The loading speed of any website can have a direct impact on its SEO score. In other words, if your website takes forever to load, you may have little or no chance to rank on the higher positions of search engines.
How you can check the loading speed of your website?
Again, there are several online tools such as https://tools.pingdom.com that can show you not only the loading speed of your website, but it will also show you the ways to improve the speed so that you can hire a web developer and get it fixed.
Here are some of the ways to fix the slow loading websites:
- Optimizing the images before uploading them
- Eliminate unnecessary plugins
- Make sure your website’s plugins & theme are up-to-date
- Make use of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks)
- Enable browser caching
- Turn on Gzip compression
- Minifying CSS & JS
#4 Ensuring responsiveness
How friendly your website is toward different kinds of devices such as mobiles and tablets?
Google has already announced that mobile-friendliness is one of the ranking factors in its search engine algorithms.
What does this mean?
This simply means that the websites that are not mobile-friendly may potentially lose some SEO scores because they wouldn’t be delivering a good experience to mobile users.
A responsive website design can help you in:
- Gaining higher search engine rankings.
- Enhancing the user experience.
- Reducing the bounce rate.
- Increasing the user-interaction rate.
How to check the responsiveness of any website?
You can check the responsiveness score of your website here https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
#4 Optimizing contents & links
Last but not the least, you can optimize the contents & links of your website. Content is considered as a king when it comes to optimizing a website for search engines.
Here are a few ways in which you can ensure that your website has optimized content:
- Use appropriate keywords, don’t overuse them.
- Update the content of your website regularly.
- Interlink the webpages through your primary & secondary keywords.
- Use appropriate header tags such as H1, H2, etc.
- Use appropriate text formatting such as bold, hyperlink, etc.
For optimizing the navigation of your website, here are some tips:
- Keep it clean and don’t overdo it.
- Make sure that your primary links are visible on top and footer, for all the webpages.
- Make sure that there are no broken links.
