How to make a website SEO friendly

SEO, SEO for Beginners, Podcast

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.

 

free SEO class

 

How do you 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.

 

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 keyword in the optimization element, it takes note and knows that is what this page is about.

 

Request a copy of my SEO Content Quick Start Guide 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. 

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

If you want to learn more about creating an SEO-friendly website for your business, register for my free SEO class.