Having an online business means your website is going to be the center of your marketing world. For your website to be successful, it must receive a greater amount of organic search. This can only be achieved by optimizing your website and making it SEO friendly.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays an integral role in driving relevant traffic to your website. Having an SEO-friendly website increases your chances of gaining higher rankings on Google and other search engines. You can also increase the traffic of tree service websites by strengthening SEO. Good SEO on the website allows several search engines to read and explore pages across your website. When the search engine crawls your website, it is important that it understands your content and prioritizes it when a relevant search query is made.
Designing a website is no extraordinary feat for any skilled individual, but creating an SEO-friendly website requires careful research, planning, and execution. Sadly, many business owners don’t focus on SEO right from the initial phase of designing their websites. These websites usually look attractive, but they lack a critical component of digital marketing. And it is only after lackluster results that business owners and marketers deduce where they went wrong. For this reason, conducting a site audit from time to time is also essential.
Moving forward, here’s how to know whether your website is SEO-friendly or not.
Code
You don’t have to be a web developer to know if your website is SEO-friendly or not. If you are an inbound marketer, there is a bare minimum of what you need to check in your website’s coding to determine its SEO and site health. Make sure that the code of your website is exceptionally tidy. If it isn’t, Google or any other search engine will not be able to crawl your website quickly and thoroughly. This simply implies that it won’t show up properly in search engines. Your website’s health will be much better by ensuring that crawlers don’t trip over poorly formatted lines or extra tags in the code. Crawlers must be able to parse through the code swiftly.
Domain Name
It is imperative that the domain you choose for your website makes sense and is relevant to what you do. All the variations and subdomains of the selected domain should point towards your main website. To think that having a keyword in your domain name would help is an incorrect assumption. In fact, it is far better to pick a name that is catchy, easy to pronounce, and relevant at the same time.
Hosting And CMS
For an SEO-friendly website, choosing a good server for hosting is crucial. A slow website not only makes your users unhappy, but is also penalized down-ranked by search engines for slow loading times. Even the content management system you choose can affect loading speed. In most situations, WordPress is a great option, but it isn’t the only one. WordPress has an edge of being wired at a very basic level making it easy to use by content creators and publishers and easy to crawl by Google and other search engines.
Indexation
For search engines to understand your website, they should be able to read the content on all the pages of the website. For this, you need text-based content behind the scenes. Use clear language so that search engines can understand what your company is about and what you have to offer. However, text-based content doesn’t mean that your website doesn’t need videos or images. PDFs, videos, and images are also important for creating an engaging user experience, but they should be appropriately indexed to be discovered in search.
Link Structure and Navigation
Make sure that your website has internal links that can be crawled by search engines. These internal links, along with the homepage, need to be indexed properly. Your search engine directives, primary navigation, and tools such as XML sitemaps all play an integral role in helping the search engine crawl your website and explore new pages. Having a well-structured website also helps with navigation. Navigation isn’t just about the menu at the website top. It is about directing your users to the most important and relevant part of your website. You can easily mess-up this flow if you don’t put much thought into your website’s design in the initial stages. Complex navigation paths aren’t user-friendly and affect the traffic on your website’s internal pages resulting in leser clicks and poor search results.
Page Titles and Headings
Every page on your website should have a page title. Every page title should be unique and, most importantly, relevant to the page it is associated with. You can easily achieve this if your content management system is on HubSpot or WordPress, as these platforms make editing page titles very simple. Along with editing page titles, you can also set the corresponding meta descriptions. Similarly, it would be best if you had headings to separate sections. The headings on your website should lead to your content, just like the chapter of a book. Again, you can make these adjustments in your content management system. There is a bonus to having headings on your website as they provide an opportunity to add keywords.
Mobile-Friendly Design
Currently, the leading device used for internet searches is a mobile phone. Websites that are being optimized for SEO must give equal consideration to optimize sites for mobile devices as well. Your website needs to have a responsive design to be optimized for mobile traffic. Remember, the user experience on a desktop is much different than that on a smartphone. A non-responsive design creates a bad user experience. And since the bulk of your traffic might be coming from mobile devices, not having a responsive website can significantly affect search engine results.
Page Speed
Since we are talking about websites optimized for mobiles, page speed is also a key consideration. Users are usually impatient and don’t like websites that take forever to load. So it is very critical that the pages of your website are lean and mean as the speed indicates an SEO-friendly website.
These are some of the ways to find out if your website is SEO-friendly or not. Although you are required to base the website design on SEO-friendly rules right from the beginning, you must revisit your website frequently and improvise accordingly. Search engines continuously update their policies and algorithms for ranking websites. If you’re not up to date on these trends, your website’s ranking will slip down and will be long forgotten in no time.