Your website is your online storefront. Your website should uphold every brand value prop you believe in. Your customers should be able to feel safe, comfortable and interested while browsing your site. Your site should be the focus of your digital marketing universe. All other galaxies, stars and planets should revolve around your site. That is how you can find good leads and generate organic traffic.
What are you doing wrong?
“Most marketers often go wrong while designing a website”, says Andy, the lead strategist of the leading Sunshine Coast Based SEO company. They pick their website templates, themes and plugins first. They think about SEO later. SEO is not just a part of your site. It serves as the pillar of any successful website. The stronger the pillar, the more visible is the site. If you have long-term plans of participating and acing the marketing race, you should start building your website SEO from the first level.
Search engine optimisation should be an integral part of your site design. It acts as a navigation system for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! It will help the search engine crawlers find which way they should go and what pages they should rank. It is not a patchwork that you can apply to your website to suddenly make it more visible and lucrative for crawlers. You need to contribute to your optimisation bit by bit, to help your site meet target goals.
What is an SEO friendly site?
Any website that is amicable towards Google bots and search engine crawlers is an SEO friendly site. The search engine should be able to understand the content, rank them for keywords, analyse the context of the keyword variations and serve the site contents to users looking for specific search terms.
You need to build your website keeping site crawler paths in mind. Always keep your website structure simple. Navigation friendly websites always rank higher than sites with a complicated page hierarchy. Balance the representation of your business and services and SEO enhancement features while building.
What are the archenemies of SEO?
Most webmasters struggle with content and sites that refuse to become tamed by SEO. Here are the reasons
- Content that does not have a clear location
- Content only found through site search
- Ajax and Flash effects
- Java programs, audio and video files without captions, alt texts and descriptions
- Too many subdomains
How to design an SEO friendly site?
To begin the process, construct a working digital marketing plan with a business model. Your business value proposition should also play a significant role in the entire process. These are the raw materials you need to begin your excellent website building process.
Fundamentals of SEO friendly website design –
Domain
Keep this simple. Make sure; your domain makes sense to your human users. The search engine is gradually leaning towards human preferences. Unless you keep your domain name human-friendly, you will never make your website crawler friendly.
Hosting
Pick a dedicated hosting with no downtime. A shared hosting may look lucrative if you are a little tight on funds, but dedicated hosting will keep your site faster. It will help in user retention, and it will boost the conversion rate too.
CMS
Content management system is necessary for every website. You may have an e-commerce website or a blog website; you will need a smart CMS platform. CMS and WordPress have become synonymous. If that is your choice of CMS as well, you can be sure that Google will find you. CMS gives your site information a basic structure that helps search engine bots to crawl your site and keep your domain visible to new users.
Link structure
Internal links form a huge part of SEO strategies. You need to represent the links to your internal content on the XML sitemaps. Your search engine directives and the XML map will aid in search engine crawling. You can use SEO auditing tools like the Screaming Frog to make sure that the site structure is crawler friendly.
Information hierarchy and site structure
If you consider your website to be a tree, the main branches become your high-level categories, sub-branches are your subcategory, and your twigs with leaves are your documents and pages. I have found using the tree-branch analogy quite useful in explaining a standard website structure.
The context of a keyword or key phrases depends on its position on the site. This structuring is relevant to services pages, locations pages, FAQ content, blog pages, articles and about everything else. You simply need to structure your data and information in a way that search engines will be able to understand.
Some websites do have a more complicated structure. They take a deeper approach. We have also seen 6-8 level approaches that work for certain sites. If your SEO team is considerably new and you are unsure of your relationship with search engine optimisation, keep your site structure as simple as a 3-4 level approach.
URLs
Make sure all your 301s redirect to your primary website domain. URL also dictates the context of a keyword. Keep your naming trends simple enough for human understanding and search engines will automatically catch up.
Navigation
What is a website without a direct navigation option? If you entered our site and had no idea where to go, how would you find our best blog posts or featured service offers? Similarly, every search engine crawler needs to see clear paths for navigation.
Do not think that navigation is only the menu at the top of your website! It is a way of discovering new services, offers and posts. You need to think of this step before you start building the site. Sit down with your website designer and draw the hierarchy of your site pages along with the navigation options for each one of them.
Users should not have to stop and think or solve a math problem every time they click on an option. Navigation should be smooth, directional and overt.
Conclusion
Make your website understandable, simple and blatant. All search engines and users should be able to locate it, navigate it and enjoy!
Author Bio: Harold Smith is an optimisation strategist. He has worked with several Sunshine Coast Based SEO firms.