The Basics of an SEO Friendly Website

It’s understandable how complex SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be to someone just getting into internet marketing. It’s constantly evolving and even those with many years of experience don’t fully understand every aspect. The reason is search engine algorithms continue to change year over year. As the internet grows more and more websites are competing for our attention, search engines need to find better ways to make relevant sites stand out from the rest. Relevancy is the keyword. Whether you’re creating a new website, rebuilding an old site, or just making a few changes to help with a website’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) there are basic practices that can make a huge difference. A small amount of knowledge can go a long way. Here are ten basic steps you can take to increase your rankings.

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1. Content – let’s start with content since it’s possibly the most important aspect of any website. Good content is genuine and flows naturally. Simply keep the content relevant about a product, service, or idea you’re trying to communicate. Don’t write about drums if your webpage is supposed to be about guitars. Be sure to keep the content organized in a way that it can be easily indexable, meaning the search engine bots (software agents that index your webpages) are able to follow a clear path.
2. Keywords – focus each page on your website on specific keywords, build your content around these keywords. You may even want to research keywords that you would like people to discover your website. Be sure not too overdo it. Search engines will catch on if you’re abusing certain keywords. It’s all about quality over quantity.
3. Optimize Images – keep physical image sizes as low as you can without losing the quality. Even in the age of fast internet speeds you need to be sure that images are small. Remember many use mobile devices and they don’t want to burn through their data looking at your website. Add alt tags and titles to each image to help search engines make sense of what they’re indexing. Be sure to name the image like you would a keyword but use different variations; guitar.jpg, guitars.jpg, guitar-playing.jpg. The tags, titles, and naming will help with image searching such as Google Images.
4. H1 Header – the H1 should be the biggest and boldest of the header styles. There are usually seven styles for text, headers H1 through H6 and a paragraph style. The paragraph style is most of the content on your webpage and the H styles are all of headers. Most webpages will only use H1 as a main header and H2 as a sub-header. Search engine bots are attracted to headers especially the H1 header so put them to good use. They tell the bots what the content will be about since it’s the title of the page.
5. Static URL Construction – the way your URL (address of a webpage) is structured can play a huge role in how well your website and individual webpages will be optimized. Don’t expect dynamic pages that are automatically generated from your CMS (Content Management System) to be optimized (example https://guitars-rock.com/blog/?id=123). Be sure they use static structures (example https://guitars-rock.com/blog/buckethead-most-underrated-guitarist).
6. Interlinking – be sure to link all related content within your website and to appropriate external websites. External sites should be legitimate and not spam sites. If you link to website’s that are not in good standings with search engines then this could harm your optimization efforts.
7. Site Speed – streamline your website with unnecessary information, useless plugins, and optimized images. Webpages that have fast load times will be favored over slower ones.
8. Social Media – if you have social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter be sure to share content from your website to these social platforms. Users will want to visit your website to view good content and if you’re lucky they’ll share that content. Once they do you’ll see a huge boost to your SEO.
9. Meta Description – the meta description is a sentence that describes the topic or subject to the website visitor and search engine. Use some keywords from the content on the webpage and keep it under 160 characters.
10. Go Mobile – with the increase of mobile devices including smart phones and tablets, websites need to be mobile friendly which means they automatically adjust based on the screen resolution. Nobody wants a webpage that’s tiny, hard to read and hard to navigate. Search engines will pick up on this and favor those that are optimized for mobile.

 
Optimizing your website for search engines can be a daunting task. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes when a user asks a search engine to bring up relevant websites. However, if you always keep your content relevant and make it easy for the user to navigate your site and make it easy for a search engine to index your pages then you can’t go wrong. There is a huge array of things you can do to help your website get an edge but if you stick to the list above, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how well your website performs.  

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