Since we all know that getting traffic to any website is as important as its development in the first place, having an SEO-friendly website is a must thing to have.
Without an SEO-friendly website, you may not be able to achieve higher rankings on search engines easily.
While there are several SEO activities that can be done without optimizing a website, but they may not be able to show the desired results if the website is not SEO-friendly.
Therefore, before hiring a web developer, you must ensure that he or she is able to create an SEO-friendly website for you.
But the question is “what are the essential features of any SEO-friendly website?”.
In this blog post, I have shared 6 things that a website builder can do to make your website SEO-friendly.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
#1 Designing a responsive website
Having a responsive website is the first & foremost requirement of an SEO-friendly website.
Why?
Search engines like Google have officially stated that they will consider responsive design as one of the signals for ranking a website on search engine result pages.
What exactly is a responsive website?
- A responsive website shows different layout for the desktop users and different one for hand-held devices such as mobiles & tablets.
- A responsive website changes its shape automatically according to the different screen resolutions of different devices.
In the pursuit of building an SEO-friendly site, your developer must emphasize on designing a responsive layout for your website.
A responsive website has several benefits such as:
- Higher search engine rankings.
- Better user-experience of smart device users.
- More sales & conversions through appropriate usage of call-to-action buttons.
- Attracting a wider audience. Your audience will be able to access your website through different devices in all shapes and sizes.
Recommended post: 5 Web design tips to ensure responsiveness of a website
#2 Optimizing loading speed
For a website to be SEO-friendly, it must load within 5 seconds. A website that takes more than 7-8 seconds to load completely, may have some challenges in securing higher positions on search engines.
Therefore, if you want an SEO-friendly website, you must ask your website maker to take care of the loading speed.
Optimized loading speed of a website can help in 2 major ways:
- Higher search engine rankings.
- Better user-experience.
Why some websites load slowly?
Well, there could be many reasons for a website to load slow, however below are some of the most common causes:
- Outdated plugins and modules.
- Usage of heavy images on the website.
- Rendering too many JavaScripts & CSS.
- Unused codes & scripts.
- Server’s performance issue.
How can your web developer fix the slow loading speed of your website?
- Using reliable plugins & theme.
- Optimizing the images for the sizes.
- Minifying Javascript and CSS
- Optimizing the codes and removing the useless scripts.
- Having a check on your server and advising you on a better option for the website hosting, if required.
Recommended post: 7 Actions to improve the loading speed of your website
#3 Optimizing meta tags
What are meta tags?
Meta tags are the code snippets that are not visible to the users but are present with each webpage of your website (in HTML format).
Why meta tags are necessary?
- Meta tags, especially description tag, canonical tags, alt tags & title tag help search engines to provide brief information about each webpage of your site so that the search engine crawlers can rank your webpages accordingly & appropriately.
- Even more importantly, title & description tags are visible to the users on search engine result pages (SERPs) when they are searching for any information, product or services.
Therefore, it is very crucial to optimize the title & description tags for both search engines and users as they are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for any given result.
Which meta tags are important for your website’s SEO?
- Title tag
- Description tag
- Alt tags
- Canonical tag
#4 Optimizing images
Images on any website play an important role in several ways like:
- Images make a website look beautiful.
- Images, if optimized well, can help in search engine optimization too.
- Images encourage users to stay on the website for longer period of time.
But the key here is “image optimization“.
Below are but few important ways in which a website builder can optimize the images to create an SEO-friendly website.
- Optimizing the images for their sizes so that your website loads faster.
- Associating alt tags with each image on your website so that search engine crawlers can know more about your webpages.
- Choosing the right file type that’s acceptable by search engines.
- Including images in the sitemap.xml file
#5 Checking broken links
Broken links are the links that lead to nowhere. In other words, when the users click on broken links, they show “page not found” error.
Having broken links on any website can affect in 3 major ways:
- Broken links can affect the SEO score of any website badly.
- Broken links can frustrate your users and affect their experience with your website.
- If broken links exist on your site, the visitors won’t be able to access the information. Eventually they will move on to a different site.
What are the major causes of broken links on any website?
- A typo mistake while creating the links.
- Deleting an existing file or an entire web page.
- Migrating the website server or domain name.
- Renaming an existing page and not updating the internal links accordingly.
- Linking to stuff like PDF, images etc. that have been deleted.
- The external site to which the link was pointed is no longer available.
How you can detect broken links on your website
There are several online tools available like https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ that you can use and find out the broken links on your website.
Having said above, finding & fixing the broken links is one of the effective ways in which your website developer can make your website SEO-friendly.
#6 Interlinking webpages
Interlinking the webpages is also an important part of search engine optimization.
The interlinking can help you in several ways, such as:
- Interlinking enables the search engine crawlers to visit other webpages of your site and index them as well. In other words, interlinking enhances the SEO score of your website.
- Interlinking helps your website users to browse different yet related webpages through the links associated with the keywords or phrases.
- Interlinking helps to reduce the bounce rate of your website because it makes your website more engaging.
How can your website developer make your website SEO-friendly?
Your web designer or developer can make your website SEO-friendly by installing & configuring any of the reliable interlinking plugins or modules.
If your website has been developed using WordPress, your developer can install a plugin like “SEO Smart links Premium” that can interlink the webpages on your site automatically.