How to make a website SEO friendly

Do you have a website that needs more traffic? Have you heard that SEO can drive lots of free traffic for you? Are you unsure where to start with SEO or how to use it to drive traffic? If so, you’re in luck because that’s exactly what I want to discuss today.  Making a website SEO-friendly is pretty easy if you know what to do. An SEO-friendly website can help you drive a lot more traffic than one that's not optimized correctly. 

What’s an SEO-friendly website anyway?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO-friendly means a website is designed with search engines in mind and is easy for them to browse and understand. This is important because when your website is search engine friendly, you can get more traffic from Google and other search engines. By doing a few things on your website, making it easier for Google to understand, they're more likely to rank your website higher in the search results. 

How to make a website SEO-friendly

You can do a few things to help the search engines better understand the content on your website. The better they understand your content, the more likely they are to start to trust it and show it to new people, which should give you a better chance to get more traffic to your site. 

Search engines find information on websites and blogs by clicking links on the pages and following them to see what information each one has. They go from site to site across the internet, looking for information to index and share the next time someone searches for it. They look for specific information on each page to help understand what it’s about. You can increase your chances of your website’s information being shown to searchers by having the information they’re looking for on your site and ensuring it's SEO-friendly.

To make your website SEO-friendly, choose an SEO keyword for each blog post or website page and use that keyword in your SEO elements. By helping Google understand the content on your website, you increase your chances of ranking higher in the search results and getting more traffic. 

Listen to the podcast here. 

What information do search engines look for on your SEO-friendly website?

Search engines look for a series of SEO elements on each website page or blog post to understand what the page is about. Each time they find the same keyword in an element, it’s like a check mark to the search engine spider that this is what the page is about. The more consistent you are in the keywords you use in the areas they’re looking at, the more likely they’ll understand your content and show it to someone searching for it in the future.

How to make sure you have an SEO-friendly website

Choose one keyword for your blog post or website page. You will use this same keyword in all the important areas the search engine will look at. You want to use your keyword in the following areas:

• Title Tag
• Meta Description
• Image File Name
• Image ALT Text
• URL
• Headers (the big words that separate the sections on this post)
• Copy

The search engine spider will look at each item to understand the page. Each time it sees the same SEO keyword in the optimization element, it takes note and knows that is what this page is about.

Request a copy of my Beginner's Guide to SEO to learn how to write each for SEO. It will walk you through the process.

Bonus tips to make your website even more SEO-friendly

Reduce the size of your images so that your pages load quickly. Google (and your website’s visitors) don’t like sites that load slowly. You will be less likely to rank high at the top of Google’s search results if you have a site that’s slow to load. Large image files are often the item that causes websites to load slowly. Reducing your image file sizes can help a lot and it's pretty easy to do. You can use a tool or plug-in to create smaller versions of your images. 

Also, optimize your images for SEO by using your keyword in the image file name. It's another place where Google looks for signals about your page content. 

Use responsive design in your website design. If you’re using a site builder or template, choose one that says it’s responsive and test to make sure your website looks good on different sizes, such as phone, tablet, and desktop. A website that looks good on one and awful on another doesn’t work well for Google or the customer. Google wants everyone to have a good user experience on your website, no matter what they're searching for. This is a lot easier to do today than it was years ago. Most common website templates include responsive design options. Simply check your website on your phone, tablet, and desktop or laptop to see what the content looks like. 

While there, check your homepage and see what information is on the screen without scrolling each time. Can someone visiting your site for the first time figure out what you do or how you can help them quickly and easily? If they have to scroll to find your key message, you will lose them. Help them convert by having your message visible on the screen without scrolling in each of the screen size formats that you check. This can be the most challenging in mobile since mobile screens are small. I had to change my homepage layout recently to ensure the message was clear on the phone screen. 

Keep your website navigation simple, clean, and easy to read and navigate. Use keywords where you can in your menu bars. Limit the number of clicks your website visitors make to get to the content they’re searching for. Most people won’t click more than 1-2 times to find what they need. Make it easy to move around and find what they’re looking for, and you'll have a better user experience, which is also very important to your overall SEO performance. Google wants to share great websites with searchers, and if the information someone is looking for is hard to find on your website, they won't share yours. User experience is a very important factor for your website. 

If you want an SEO-friendly website for your business, choose a unique keyword for each page or post and use it correctly in your site’s optimization elements. Choose a keyword people are searching for, and your website can rank on page 1 of Google to get traffic. If you choose a keyword your ideal customer isn’t searching for, you might rank, but no one will find you because they’re not searching for that keyword, and you’re not ranking for the word they’re searching so they’ll go to someone who is. At the same time, if you target a keyword that’s too competitive for your website or blog to rank at the top of Google, you won’t get traffic either because you won’t show up on Page 1 – and you have to be on Page 1 to get found by searchers.

Make your website SEO-friendly and get found on Google more often to increase the organic traffic you receive each month. If you're ready to get started today, join me in Simple SEO Content, and I'll walk you through how to do this step-by-step. Let's work on your SEO-friendly website together.