Tips for Developing an SEO-Friendly Website in 2023
Every organization thrives to enhance the visibility of its business online by building a high-quality website. But, most of them cannot achieve it because they underestimate one or more SEO issues while building the website.
Before ranking a website, Google uses over 200 ranking factors in its algorithm to check the SEO quality of a website and rank them in organic search. Moving out from following the best SEO practices will lead to a downfall in your quality and impact your site ranking.
Hence, every organization must try to have an optimized website through standard SEO practices.
Your business needs an SEO-friendly website and a good SEO strategy to rank higher on search engines and generate massive incoming traffic. But your plan needs to be reviewed and updated continuously with Google's latest algorithm updates.
To ease it, one can take the help of a digital marketing services company as they are acquainted with the SEO tactics and stay updated with Google's algorithm updates. They know how to implement them appropriately.
You must consider why a business should focus more on an SEO-friendly website. We got you covered.
Why should a website be SEO-friendly?
We all know how much a website is essential for a business. It broadens your business online, generates traffic, engages visitors with the products and services, and convinces them to convert into leads.
Just think, what if a visitor wants a solution, and even though you have the potential to provide it, your business is not visible or is far from your prospects? Unfortunately, you will lose them one by one.
The fact is that most visitors only go through the first five websites available in Google's search results. As per stats, 67.6% of clicks are generated on the first five results of Google's search.
Hence, to reach your audience, you need to scale your site quality and take into account necessary SEO measures to bring your website back into the mainstream.
Generate organic traffic
Being visible online is not everything to drive organic traffic; being visible in front of your target audience matters. When you find the keywords that your audience uses to search for a particular product or solution, you should use those keywords to build informative content that answers all your audience's concerns.
When preparing content for your website pages or blogs, always keep in mind to add content that is relevant to your customers and answers their problems. The more you refine your content, you will witness more relevant organic traffic to your site.
Improves customer experience
As you focus more on customer satisfaction by implementing SEO, you will earn repeat customers, which means you have good traffic to your site. The reputation you get from customer recognition will boost your site's ranking in the search engine.
Stay profitable till you maintain the standard
Are you maintaining your website periodically? If not, you must. A website yields good results through regular checks of the website's health, SEO strategies, and many more. When you take care of your overall website, you will find many flaws, whether in design, technical, or any other, and you should address them ASAP. When you take care of your website, remember that all the SEO practices will help boost your website's presence and increase conversion rate and sales.
Rank Higher
Customers love interacting with a business with SEO-friendly websites that give them a good user experience and adequately address their queries. When everything is done right, it helps your website to rank better in the SERP. This ranking gives the brand exposure to more audiences who can be the target customers. Once the website continues to rank better, it gets recognition from the users online and builds credibility for the brand.
How To Make the Website SEO Friendly
Are you looking to get the best from your website? Do you know how to do it? If not, follow the tips to crosscheck your website with these effective SEO measures to ensure you are ahead of your competitors in 2023.
Ease the navigation for visitors
Just imagine you want to go to a place where you are new. You don't have maps to locate your destination, and there is none to help you. Is it possible to reach there effortlessly? Not at all. The same concept applies to visitors coming to your site for the first time.
38% of visitors look for navigation links when they visit the website for the first time. A website without proper navigation will end up with visitors turning their back on the site, which will incur a loss to your business.
Hence, provide user-friendly navigation on your homepage for users to navigate more easily. Sometimes the sitemap of your website can also be helpful for your users where they can find the list of pages you have on your website in one place and navigate where they want. So, you must keep your sitemap up-to-date with new page links when you add new pages to your website. It will direct the visitors to visit that page effortlessly.
Choose a domain that is SEO-Friendly
You must be thinking about how a domain is a part of SEO. It is essential because it helps visitors to identify the industry to which your business belongs. For example, if your website is for traveling, you should choose a name that reflects travel blogging. This will help your target audience to identify and relate you with their query, which in turn will make you more reliable. Research keywords and try to use them wisely while choosing an interesting, unique, and simple name for your domain that visitors can easily remember, trust and tempt to visit your site as per their needs.
Check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not
Did you know? There is a whopping 59.5% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. People are switching to mobile technology as it gives comfortable browsing and easy web access without any issues.
Each device has a different screen resolution, and your website must fit all the screens without changes in the design components. It means the website you see on the desktop must look the same on mobile and other devices.
It is possible to achieve this only when your website is mobile-friendly.
Developing a mobile-friendly website is also a part of SEO as it eases the visitors to access the website through mobile phones and get engaged in the same way as they do on their laptops or PCs.
Add captions to all your images and videos
Adding captions to images and videos gives an idea to the visitors about what information you want to share with them through the media.
It is a better practice to use relevant keywords in the captions so that when someone searches an image or video using that keyword, the search engine goes through the captions, checks the keywords, and generates relevant media in front of the searchers. It also ranks the images and videos in the search engine when it fulfills the audience's search intent.
Focus on Content clarity
Before jumping to how content clarity is essential for SEO-friendly websites, let's first understand what Content clarity means.
Content Clarity is when your content is straightforward, easy to understand, and valuable to your reader.
When we publish fresh, clear, and relevant content on our website, it can be related to the details about any services or products; this gives comprehensive information that your visitor is searching for to enhance their knowledge of products or services on your website.
Google loves explicit, fresh, relevant content that engages customers and fulfills their needs. This, in return, helps you rank better for a particular search and attracts the potential audience.
Use internal and external links wisely
An internal link takes the users to pages inside the same website, whereas external links direct the users to another website. External links in content connect your readers to online resources where they can get additional information about a particular topic.
Internal links help search engines find and index the pages present on your website.
Similarly, external links represent the pages from another website and gain credibility when we use them in our content to refer to or justify a fact we share. At the same time, when other websites use your site as an external link, you also gain credibility for your website.
Improve page load time
Page load speed is the average time it takes for a page to load entirely on your screen. A page load is a make-or-break factor, as it is like a door to your website that enables your prospects to either move into the site or leave it with a bad experience.
Around 46% of users change their minds to ignore the website where they experience a delay in the page load of more than 4 seconds. On the other hand, if a website loads within 4 seconds, there is a positive impact on the conversion rate.
You can improve your page load time by checking the following points:
Optimizing images and reducing the size takes less time for the website to load the images.
Limit redirects by avoiding creating unnecessary internal links.
On the technical side, optimize the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript elements. Extra codes require more time to execute on the server and take time to respond to the browser.
Look into the plug-ins that are of no use. Remove or disable whichever suits you best.
Optimize meta descriptions
A meta description is a summary that best describes the content of a particular page that appears in the search result. The content should tell your readers what they will find after clicking on your link. Writing a good meta description follows a few simple rules that keep it short, descriptive, and keyword optimized.
Points to focus on to make create a better-optimized meta description:
Keep the length of the description short within a limit of 155-160 characters.
Use active voice and make it actionable
Include a call-to-action
Use your focus keyword
Make it unique
Remember, a meta description is your only chance to win over your readers on a google search page before they decide to enter your website. Be sure you create a descriptive and engaging meta for your website that will persuade your visitors to choose your website first.
- Focus on readability
An SEO-friendly website focuses on design as well as on readability. It is essential to work on the understanding level of the content so that visitors from all ranges can decipher the information you are sharing with them. Format the content style to attract the readers to read it without pain.
How to improve my content readability?
Break long sentences into easy-to-read short sentences
Write your content in the conversational tone
Choose a user-friendly and easy to read Typography
Use Proper Formatting and Hierarchy for the headers
Use transition words
Use short and simple words instead of difficult and complex words
Enhance user experience
When your website gives a smooth experience to people, they spend more time on the website. Google notices this engagement and considers your site helpful and credible. It will start ranking your website in its search engine so that more audiences can reach your site.
Did you know? As per a survey, 88% of people voted they would never return to a site with a poor user experience.
So, is your website ready to have a long-lasting impression on users? If not, it is essential to make your user's journey on the website seamless and impressive. You need to focus on the points like page speed, accessibility, customer support, and comprehensive product description with attractive images and videos to give enough time for the visitors to stay long on the website.
Conclusion
It requires a lot of time, effort, and experience to tick the checklist of the SEO practices that we discussed above. It is also essential to continuously follow up the development work on this segment with effective planning to achieve good results.
It is a wise decision to grab the attention of a digital marketing company to align your website with the best SEO strategies and get it ranked at the top in SERP in 2023.
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Written by
Neha Srivastava
Neha Srivastava
I am working as a project consultant with a digital growth agency since 2018. My obsession with technology has converted me into a dedicated tech-savvy writer. She loves to talk about the latest designs, development, technologies, trends, and many more.