7 quick tips to make your website or blog more SEO friendly

Everyone wants to achieve better search engine rankings as organic search traffic is a tested and proven technique for business growth.

The main hiccup is SEO, which keeps evolving. Although it’s a good thing because you no longer require a ton of backlinks, supportive microsites, keyword stuffing or heavy usage of anchor texts to rank higher on search engines.

The only trouble is no one wants to be penalized by Google for not following its algorithms and trends.

Google is reported to change its algorithm for a search around 500 times every year. Some are small and can be ignored, but major updates such as Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird has caused a lot of stir in the SEO community.

So, the key is to perform ethical Search Engine Optimization for your website like creating user-friendly content and winning links from a credible source. For that you will have to make your website or blog more SEO Friendly and here are some tips to it.

#1. Build a great website/blog

A well designed professional looking blog/website will not ensure that it gets a high amount of traffic or augment your customer base. To increase the traffic, your website design has to be SEO friendly. Here are few simple yet crucial tips to developing an SEO friendly website design:

• Keywords in URLs. Use the important keyword in your URLs or file names. For example, an URL such as https://www.beautyproducts.com/products/item2?=2142 is not searched engine friendly whereas https://www.beautyproducts.com/shop/haircare will make search engine happy. Also, try to limit the category to 2 or 3 in the URL and use hyphens to separate the words in URL.
• Image Optimization – Always optimize images on the website/blog along with content. You need to make sure that the images uploaded are not more than 100kb to avoid loading problem. Only upload relevant images and don’t forget to use keywords in text section for search engines to crawl better.
• Limit JavaScript – Next best thing you can do to design an SEO friendly website is limit the usage of JavaScript. There are two reasons to it, one JavaScript doesn’t work well with mobile and then search engines struggles to crawl through the website with a great deal of JavaScript.
• Browser Check – Your website design should be accessible on all available browsers to increase ranking with search engines. Check if the website loads slowly on some browser or having difficulty in navigation, then you need to fix it all.
• Avoid Flash Elements – A website with too much of flash elements tend to distract visitors, causing abandoned page. Also flash is not friendly to search engines, so use them sparingly if required.

#2. Do Keyword Research and Place them appropriately

Keyword research is probably the most important factor one should consider in developing SEO friendly blog/website. Because today, 9 out of 10 online users type a keyword on search engines to look for information.

So until you know the important words and phrases your website need to rank, you cannot start the SEO process. There are few tools to do the keyword research such as WordStream or Google Keyword Research Tool. Once you know them place your keywords in different places within your website.

• Keyword Placing Areas – If you have a certain topic with a focused keyword then make sure to place them in title tag, H1 tags, H3 tags, title attributes of images/links, and throughout in the text. It’s the most basic form SEO On-Page Factor.
• TF-IDF – Google is using TF-IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency) technology to determine how often your keyword appears compared to the expectations a large or small document might have. This is one of the most important on-page concepts you need to consider when getting your page rank better.
• Segmenting Pages – Each web page has different parts such as header, footer, sidebar etc. So where you place your keyword is more important than the keyword itself. Segmenting pages has now become even more important as users are moving towards mobile devices. So to serve these mobile users, incorporating keywords in all these areas become prevalent.

#3. Build a Sitemap

Sitemap helps user and search engines show the structure of your site in one single page. Sitemaps serve as a way to navigate your site easier and communicate with search engines directly. In terms of SEO, a sitemap usually helps spiders find all important pages and explain your site’s hierarchy.

The key is to get your page indexed and sitemap informs search engines about any change or update made to the website. Especially, if your site is large it’s a good practice to build several sitemap pages. There are two ways to build a sitemap –

• If you have good technical knowledge then you can download and install a sitemap generator such as Google Sitemap Generator. This generator is based on Python script, so have Python 2.2 if want to run this.
• Another way to generate a sitemap is to use free online tools, which can do the job. These tools are pretty straightforward allowing you to review the crawled URLs, remove duplicated URLs, excluded URLs, and more. Just remember to include only pages that you wish search engine should index and value.

#4. Integrated SEO within your content marketing strategy 

We understood that SEO keeps moving with updated algorithms, but a powerful SEO content strategy can never get outdated. Especially if you are run an eCommerce business then chances are high that you face tough competition. To remain ahead you need to write compiling content that brings valuable traffic. And even if you are not selling anything a good piece of content will surely get inbound links. SEO friendly blogs with great content can be developed in the following pattern:

• Blog Posts – Blog is one of the easiest ways to develop regular informative content. Blog posts help to generate organic traffic, attract links and build authority.
• Articles – If you have a magazine kind of websites, posting regular articles, interviews or feature post to drive great traffic from search engine.
• Guides – Guides works excellently with “how to” types of articles. It’s a longer piece of content than regular posts explaining how things work in detail.
• Video – The future of content marketing is video marketing and more businesses are adopting videos to convey their message. As search engine also crawl videos, by creating a video with competitive keyword can easily be ranked high.
• Infographics – Infographics are an amazing way to incorporate a lot of data in form of pictures, graphs or charts. However, the big image size is often a problem for search engines to crawl or index as content. So make sure you carefully optimize the image size and rest of the page.
• Product Page – People running an eCommerce website can create a good product page with keyword rich content.

#5. Focus on External links

External or outbound links are links that point to some other related domain from your site. External links are the best technique one can apply to increase trust and credibility of your site, which is vital for SEO friendly blog. This SEO technique not only helps the search engine understand your blog better but also offer the best way to build relation with a blogger from the same niche as yours. You can use Google Related Link Operator to figure out relevant links. Here are things you should consider when performing doing external linking.

• Relevant Blogs Only – Try to link up with websites or blogs that have the same niche as yours. Search engines keep track of external links and value only relevant ones. So, ensure you are linking with relevant, trusted and worthy sites only.
• Limit External Linking – Instead of focusing on getting too many external links concentrate on linking with fewer and relevant blogs. This takes care of better reader experience and encourages visitors to come back.
• Avoid Link Farms – Following Google’s Panda updates, it’s better to avoid two-way back linking. Google has been penalizing domains that are linked with private blog networks and devaluing their links.

#6. Start a PPC Account

Having a PPC Account such as Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing will get you huge search traffic for your keywords. Search engines will display your ads in the sponsored result search and you will have to pay a fee based on chosen pattern. It might sound expensive, but if you have allotted separate budget on advertising, it’s worth investing. PPC works best for people that are looking for more traffic and visibility instantly.

#7. Add Social Media Elements

Search engines respect social networks, just like your prospective customer. Make sure you add social media elements/icons linked with your social media accounts in each of your website pages. This will help to boost search engine ranking and attribute company’s trustability.

By making an SEO friendly website you can improve your company’s or organization’s visibility. Try these simple yet effective techniques to your website/blog and see search engine’s reaction.