Building an SEO-friendly website is as important as building a website.
Why?
Because without SEO, you may not receive ample traffic on your website due to which you may get low or no sales. Having said this, it becomes even more important than ever for your website builder to consider SEO (search engine optimization) while developing your website.
Although SEO must be an integral part of any website development process, sadly very few web developers follow SEO norms when they build any website.
Therefore, before you hire a website developer, do make sure that he or she knows how to implement on-page SEO norms on any website.
But the question is “how can a website builder create an SEO-friendly website?”.
In this blog post, we are going to share 6 things that your website developer can do to make your website SEO-friendly.
Let’s get started!
#1 Meta Tags
The very first thing that an SEO expert starts with after defining the keywords is to write optimized meta tags and implement them on each page of a website.
What are meta tags?
A meta tag is a snippet of code that tell search engines about the important information on your web page. Some of the meta tags like title & description tags even tell the search engines what information visitors should see about their webpage on the search listing pages.
One thing to note here is that the meta tags are only visible in the HTML code and not on the front end of the website.
To sum up, meta tags:
- Are the HTML snippets that are not visible on the webpages but are present in each webpage’s codes?
- Tells the user about the important information of any webpage before they even click on them.
- Tells the search engines about the webpage information so that they can rank each webpage accordingly, after considering other SEO algorithms too.
Now you know how important meta tags are for getting search engine rankings and encouraging visitors to click when they see your web page’s information on the search engine listings.
However, sometimes, it comes as of surprise that many websites don’t even have the provision to incorporate meta tags.
Therefore, having an appropriate arrangement to define unique meta tags for each and every webpage individually must be the first priority of your website builder toward creating an SEO-friendly site.
Below are but a few important meta tags that your web pages must have:
- Title tag.
- Meta description.
- Canonical Tag.
- Alternative text (Alt) Tag.
#2 Responsive design
If you don’t have a responsive website, you may have very slim chances of getting ranked on search engines.
What’s a responsive website?
- A website that has a responsive or mobile-friendly view.
- A website that changes its shape automatically according to the device’s screen dimensions.
Why responsive design is important?
- A responsive design leads to a better user experience for mobile device users because they can view the website according to their hand-held device’s screen dimensions. So they don’t need to zoom in to see the website’s information
- A responsive design leads to better search engine rankings. Major search engines like Google have officially disclosed that responsive websites will be given more weightage for SEO rankings.
- A responsive website can fetch you more leads & sales. Because you are able to show the important call-to-action buttons (like Buy Now, Send Enquiry, Subscribe Now, Call Us, etc.) on your web pages prominently, your website visitors know what you expect them to do.
Having said all the above, in order to make your website SEO-friendly, your website builder must develop your website with a responsive design.
Recommended post: What are the benefits of responsive website design
#3 Optimized loading speed
Loading speed is yet another important algorithm that search engines consider for ranking any website. In simpler words, if a website is too slow and takes a lot of time to load, it may not be able to secure higher positions on search engines.
In pursuit of developing an SEO-friendly website, your website developer must take care of its loading speed.
Below are some of the important steps that your developer can take in order to optimize the loading speed of your website:
- Enabling Caching
- Removing useless plugins, modules, or codes.
- Optimizing the images by compressing their size.
- Minifying CSS & JS codes.
- Upgrading the plugins & theme
- Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Optimizing database by removing overheads
What are the benefits of optimizing a website for speed?
- Websites with optimized loading speeds have higher chances to rank in noticeable positions in search engines.
- Fast-loading websites can fetch you more sales & leads because your potential customers don’t have to wait and they can navigate your website must faster and make their decisions quickly.
How to check the loading speed of a website?
There are many online tools such as https://tools.pingdom.com that can analyze and tell you the loading speed of your website in just a few seconds.
If you too find your website’s loading speed slow, you must immediately engage a developer to fix this issue because it can affect your SEO score badly.
And if you are on a budget, then you can consider hiring an Indian website builder who can fix the loading speed issue of your website at an affordable cost.
Recommended post: 7 Ways to speed up the loading speed of your website
#4 Interlinking
Interlinking among web pages is another important feature that an SEO-friendly website must have.
How does the interlinking of web pages help in SEO?
- Interlinking helps users to navigate through the web pages hassle-free.
- Interlinking helps search engines index web pages easily.
- Interlinking helps to reduce the bounce rate of a website.
- Interlinking boosts page views.
- Interlinking helps to pass the link juice to other web pages on a site.
How can your website builder add the interlinking feature effectively?
There are lots of modules & plugins that are available for different CMS platforms like WordPress which your website developer can integrate and customize.
If your website has been developed using WordPress, you can use a plugin like “SEO Smart links Premium” to interlink your web pages with the related keywords automatically.
#5 Image optimization
While it’s true that an image can say a thousand words and using high-resolution images can make your website look attractive, using images effectively on any website can even help in its search engine optimization.
Having said above, each image your website builder use on your website should be optimized for the web.
How image optimization can help you?
- Once optimized, your images will consume lesser space and bandwidth on the server.
- Image optimization can lead to a better user experience.
How to optimize images?
There are several ways in which a developer can optimize all the images on your website for SEO. Some of these effective ways are mentioned below:
- Naming your images descriptively and in plain language.
- Optimizing the alt attributes carefully.
- Reducing/optimizing the file size of images.
- Choosing the appropriate file type.
- Using image sitemaps.
#6 Broken links fixing
Broken links are the links that lead to nowhere, on click. In other words, when clicked, broken links show a “page not found” error.
For any website to be SEO-friendly, broken links have to be taken care of.
Fixing broken links can not only improve your website’s SEO but will also help to enhance its user experience.
How to check whether your website has broken links or not?
There are several tools such as https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ that you can use to find broken links (if any) on your website easily & hassle-free.
If you do find any broken links on your website, you must take immediate action to fix them as soon as possible.
