As a business owner, having a website allows us to establish our online presence. That's because it will enable us to expand our market reach.
However, there is more to having a business website than making it look beautiful. If you want it to rank for the right keywords, you should make it SEO-friendly.
Here are five ways to do it:
Make it Responsive
In the third quarter of 2020, mobile accounted for 50.81% of the internet traffic worldwide. Hence, it is imperative to have a responsive website now more than ever.
What does it mean to have a responsive web design?
It allows you to provide a consistent experience whether a site visitor is on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone. On the other hand, it gives your site visitors reason to be loyal to your brand. That's because you are making your website usable, regardless of its screen size.
And the more usable a website is, the better your search engine rankings will be.
Optimize the URLs
Your website URL is one of the first things that a search engine bot will crawl. That's why you must optimize your URL.
Here are some quick tips:
- Make it Readable. Instead of https://yourwebsite.com/index.php?=5754225=t44=?p=987, it should be https://yourwebsite.com/blog-post-title.
- Keep it Organized. Instead of https://yourwebsite.com/blog-post-title/keyword/category, make it https://yourwebsite.com/category/blog-post-title.
- Use hyphen instead of the underscore.
- Remove the stop words like on, of, the, and more.
- Use your keywords. If your post is about building confidence, you can use /building-self-confidence.
Have a User-friendly Navigation
As mentioned earlier, search engines prefer a usable website. And you can achieve it is through user-friendly navigation.
What do we mean by "user-friendly navigation"? Every page of your website should be appropriately categorized.
If it is a blog, that would mean grouping together posts of the same category. If you own an e-commerce website, it means your product pages should be grouped.
Doing so makes it easy for your site visitors to find what they are looking for. Otherwise, they will leave your website without a second thought.
Improve Page Load Speed
Another way to have an SEO-friendly website is to improve its page load speed. In case you are wondering why speed is essential, here are some quick stats:
- 1 in every 4 visitors will leave if a website takes more than four seconds to load.
- 6 out of 10 online shoppers would buy somewhere else if your e-commerce site lacks user experience.
- Every second of delay in page load and you will be reducing customer satisfaction to 16%.
That said, it would be best you always improve your website's page load speed. Luckily, web designers these days know how to prioritize function before form.
Another excellent idea is to implement Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is an HTML framework that improves how your website loads on mobile devices.
Incorporate Social Media
Back in 2018, Hubspot conducted an experiment to test SEO results with and without social promotion. They found out that content with significant social shares gets a 22% boost on search rankings.
What does this mean? It means you should incorporate social media into your web design.
For one, it allows your site visitors to share your content to their network without hassle. Second, you are letting them expand your audience reach for you.
A simple trick to incorporate social media on your website is to add social share buttons to your content. However, ensure that you produce content that will compel them enough to share it with their friends and family. As mentioned earlier, web pages with significant social media promotion get a search engine ranking boost.
It's Time to Make a Website That Search Engines Will Love
Whether you are starting from scratch or improving your website's search engine ranking, you will never run out of ideas.
The tips listed above may sound basic, but they are integral. It is like your foundation in having a search engine-friendly website. Doing so ensures that it will appear on relevant search results.
It does not matter if you have a fancy-looking website if people do not get their things done on your website. Moreso, if they cannot come across it organically.
So, to recap, here are five design tips that can help you achieve an SEO-friendly website:
- Make it responsive
- Optimize the URLs
- Have a user-friendly navigation
- Improve page load speed
- Incorporate social media
The key to designing a website that search engines will love is to think of function before form.
Think of your site visitor's mission for landing on your website. Do they want to buy your products? If yes, then make it easy for them to do that through design.
Doing so makes your website usable. And as mentioned time and time again in this post, web usability can help your website rank on relevant search engine results.