A website is, above all, a company’s showcase on the Internet. It is the first interaction the customer will have with your business.
If the storefront is well-designed, attractive, and welcoming, more people will come to the store. However, if the storefront is old, dusty, and neglected, no one will want to visit.
Creating a website that complies with SEO best practices will save you tons of time, energy, and resources than implementing these practices once launched.
In this article, we arm you with all the necessary tools and resources to build a website that search engines will just love!
What is an SEO-Friendly web design?
SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. It helps a brand achieve the highest positioning in search engines through its website.
It’s the ranking that allows your website to stand out and gain a higher number of visitors. If the website performs perfectly in terms of SEO, there is a greater chance that those visitors will become customers.
What is an optimized website?
To say that a website is SEO-friendly, it has to meet the following criteria:
Responsive Design
Responsive website design is the ability to access a website on different screen sizes while retaining the same good user experience.
The ability of a website to adapt to other screens is now a necessity that even Google search considers as one of its search engine ranking factors. Nowadays, 50% of website visits today are made via mobile devices.
Make sure you offer a pleasant journey to your visitors, regardless of the devices from which they access your site.
Concise meta descriptions
Before accessing your website, most tend to read this small paragraph called “Meta description” which gives potential visitors an idea of the content and whether it is relevant to them.
Google will display the meta description you have provided or a snippet of your content. There’s a good chance they’ll choose the one you’ve written, so make sure it fits within 155 characters, includes your main keyword and is actionable.
Clean URL structure
The simpler the URLs are, the better they are perceived by Google’s algorithm. If the URL compiles in three words the title and the essence of the content, then it is perfect.. or example .com/real-madrid-wins-barcelona/. There is all the context of what will be on the page. This is also perceived by Google.
Fast loading web pages
If the loading process takes more than 10 seconds, your visitor will leave your website, and never return. You will also end up with a high bounce rate.The fluidity between one page and another is achieved by creating a website with clean code.
Unique content
You copied a text from your competitor and paraphrased the lines to make them look original?
Google can detect if a text has been copied from another site. If you want to have a better score for your website and be on Google’s good side, you must produce 100% original content.
Optimized images and videos
Make sure you dress your website pages with good images, creative illustrations, and fun videos to attract the attention of your visitor. But pay attention to their size.
You must optimize the size of your audiovisual content so as not to affect the page load time.
Internal links
Establishing interior links allows the user to find complementary information.
The website becomes a map for the user to explore. The interior links connect and take the user to more sites, contributing to a longer stay.
Why is it important for a company to have a good SEO website?
Helps increase organic traffic
If your website is well-engineered, user-friendly, and engaging, Google will give it a higher rank. You will attract more visits, which will be reflected in more potential customers.
Helps to get valuable traffic
Having more traffic to your website is great, but it’s better to have “leads” that buy rather than ghost visitors.
Having a good SEO strategy helps you attract customers who are interested in buying your products and services, visitors with a “commercial intent”.
Increase your brand credibility
A good SEO allows the website to be a source of trust because it demonstrates the talent, and the commitment of the company.
The way the company presents itself through its website, gives a reference to its quality. This increases your credibility in the sector, by your way of exhibiting your products and/or services.
Improve user experience
Good SEO generates a good user experience. The visual quality, the interfaces, and the interactivity of the website show the level of creativity and originality of the brand.
This allows customers to be tempted, encouraged to accept your products or services.
Tips for creating a website that works well with natural referencing
A navigable website structure
Avoid burying important pages in the depths of your website, and clean up your structure to make it intuitive, and simple to navigate. This should be done in the first step: the sitemap.
Your visitors will thank you for making their experience smooth and putting information at their fingertips.
Use responsive design
You must create a user experience that is equally good for tablet and smartphone devices, as well as for laptop and desktop screens.
It is essential that the page is versatile in that sense. Its presentation and navigability must be adaptable to the technology used by the client.
Include keywords
Each page of your website should have a focus keyword and other keywords that are relevant to the content you offer on that page and relevant to what people are searching for.
You can use SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Ubersuggest or Google’s keyword planner to search for terms that your audience searches for.
Optimize the headers
It is important to establish subtitles for paragraphs. This helps the reader to have a better reading comprehension because he will retain the key ideas. Google’s algorithm does a similar task, taking titles and subtitles as a reference.
This also contributes to a more intense use of keywords. The indexing of web pages and their content will be more accurate.
Optimize your target descriptions to increase click-throughs
The great benefit of the meta description is that it becomes the eye-catching idea for the reader to click and read the content.
It is a gateway that convinces the reader of what awaits him. It seduces him because it is brief, it is simple, it gives exact clues of what he will find on that website.
Focus on increasing the readability of your content
Another fundamental aspect of SEO is that texts should be easy to read. Paragraphs should be short, as should sentence.
Spelling is also important. The idea is that the reader is not fatigued when reading it. The font of the content must be correct to make it easy to read.
Improve page load time
Website speed will always be critical. It is necessary that the user’s activity offers peace and tranquility. And a slow page is a reason for impatience, generates insecurity, gives the feeling that something is wrong. The fast loading of content, gives guarantee that everything is very well optimized.
Through SEO audits, it is possible to analyze in depth what type of content is generating obstacles in the loading process. Generally, the use of predesigned templates, have a lot of obsolete code. And that makes navigability difficult.
Mostly, a user is patient enough to wait 5 to 6 seconds. If it takes longer, he will decide to abandon it. And this will highly increase your bounce rate.
The SSL/TLS certificate
The SSL/TLS certification is responsible for ensuring that a site is completely secure. When a website is presented as http:// and not as https://, it is because it is not secure. It is vulnerable to hacking. The S of the sites https:// indicates that a whole security protocol is active.
Currently, there is talk of TLS certification, which has taken a step ahead of what SSL certification used to represent. What is new about TLS certification is that it works with an encryption that prevents information from being stolen or transferred.
Sites with this kind of certification are more trustworthy. In fact, browsers, such as Google Chrome, place a small warning message of “Not secure”, right next to where the name of the website is.
Closing thoughts
Nowadays, it is important to have a website, but it is essential to have a website that converts visitors into buyers, subscribers, partners, attendees, etc. And to achieve this, you must consider the tips we offer above.
We believe the most valuable (but it doesn’t work alone) is to have a clean structure, and a navigable website that offers the best possible experience for your visitors.
If you are looking to revamp your website or create one from scratch, you can count on our team to guide you and help you build it based on SEO best practices.