Nowadays, there are a lot more factors that go into building an excellent website, especially for your business.
Gone are the days when you can have a website with clashing colors and automatically playing music in the background. The reason for that is because people realize that this is not the best way to have an attractive website for users.
Speaking of having an attractive website, one other thing that you need to know about when you design your site is SEO or search engine optimization.
Making your website more SEO-friendly will make it easier to find on search engines. An SEO-friendly website will rank highly on search engine results, which will lead to more website visitors.
Now that you know that SEO is important to stand out on the internet, it’s time to figure out how you can apply the right strategies. To get you started, here are nine clever tricks that will make your website SEO-friendly.
Optimize your images
There are small but meaningful changes that you can apply to your website to help improve your SEO efforts.
One small but meaningful change that you can do is optimizing your images, as well as the text that you use in these images. Since visuals are crucial to an engaging website, there’s bound to be a lot of images on your site.
What you might not know is the text that is attached to your images, such as the image title and image description, are both crucial for SEO. By using the right keywords for the right images, you make your website a lot easier to find on search results.
Another way you can optimize your images is to make sure that you don’t have too many images on each page of your website. The reason why you shouldn’t overload your webpage with visuals is that it will slow down your loading time.
Search engines look into a website’s loading speed as a usability signal. Thus, you should ensure that your website loads as fast as possible.
Crawlable URLs
One way to make your website easy to find on search engines is by creating a better system for naming your URLs.
It’s much better to use keywords instead of symbols and numbers on your web page URLs. The reason why this is the case is that search engines will have an easier time determining what a particular web page’s content is.
Publish high-quality content
Having excellent content on your website allows search engines to crawl and index your website. Since search engines are now able to index your site, your site can now show up on search results better.
Of course, not any old content will be enough. Make sure that you create worthwhile content that your website visitors and target audience really want to read or see. That way, you have high engagement on your site.
Don’t use Flash elements
When creating or publishing web content, make sure that you don’t use any Flash elements.
Google Chrome will no longer be supporting Flash by the end of 2020. Aside from that, search engines don’t put high importance on Flash.
Thus, it won’t add any value to your ranking on search engines.
Refrain from keyword stuffing
Keywords are the backbone of search engine optimization strategies.
Doing your keyword research will help you improve your chances of ranking high on search engines. However, it doesn’t mean that you should just input as many keywords as possible in your content.
If you practice keyword stuffing, Google can recognize that, and you might end up damaging your rankings even more.
Integrate social media into the design
Social media generates a lot of traffic and leads to your website. Hence, you have to make sure you incorporate social media in web design.
Although there is no direct correlation between social media and your website’s ranking on Google, it doesn’t mean that you won’t benefit from it.
After all, if your social media is getting traffic, then you can redirect it to your website.
Create a sitemap
Creating a sitemap allows search engine bots to crawl and navigate your website easily. You can send your sitemap to search engines so that they have a better understanding of your website structure.
This will help search bots understand which pages of your site are most important so that they would visit, crawl, and index those pages often.
Use robots.txt
You can use robots.txt to prevent website crawlers from crawling specific webpages. For example, you don’t want duplicate content to affect your SEO negatively. You use robots.txt for that.
Of course, you shouldn’t overdo it. Otherwise, you might end up lowering your rankings again because too many pages aren’t crawled.
Work on your backlink profile
Backlinks are when another website links to your website. If you develop a robust backlink profile, then search engines can count that as a positive for your website.
In the eyes of search engines, backlinks give you a check of approval and make your website a lot more credible.
You can get more backlinks by creating guest posts or simply by making linkable assets. Working on your backlinks will help your site gain that much-needed credibility.
Wrap Up
An SEO-friendly website is a requirement nowadays. Therefore, it’s important that you build an effective SEO strategy.
Hopefully, the nine tricks above will add a few more tools in your SEO arsenal that will help your site rank higher on search engines. Good luck!
