As marketers, we know the importance of website in digital marketing. Developing one and publishing it online isn’t enough to get the top SERP rankings, visibility, reach, etc. Search engines have to find them through crawling, indexing and ranking them accordingly based on the content type and the overall value they offer to the users. This is made possible by implementing proper SEO guidelines for website development. But what are these so-called guidelines and why are they important for building a custom SEO-friendly website? Let’s dive into those details in this article and give an overall idea.
The answer is simple, get increased reach, credibility, and organic traffic from search engines. Speaking of search engines, did you know that more than 50% of customers use Google to look for a new brand or business? If your website isn’t friendly enough for SEO, it won’t be discovered by users in the first place. Implementing these SEO website guidelines early on offers massive advantages such as improved reach, reduced costs, higher traffic, satisfying user experience and a lot more.
By neglecting SEO friendly website design guidelines, you are literally avoiding the untapped potential to make your website a more valuable asset. We have been using the term SEO-friendly repeatedly, what exactly is such a website? The exact answer to that can be determined from the image below:
Source: Ahrefs
As shown in the image, an SEO-friendly website is essentially an amalgamation of three important concepts. It has to be technically sound for the search engines, it must provide a delightful and satisfying user experience and it must include and show quality content for the search-focused customers. Take any SEO-optimized website, it is an intersection of these three core values. Now, to make a website friendly for search engines and users, it’s vital to learn and master the SEO website guidelines which we have compiled for you below, let’s dive into that.
If you think that an SEO-friendly website can be developed in just a series of clicks, it’s time to rethink. The development process takes effort and changes thanks to the frequent Google algorithm updates. Even if you build your website using these SEO website guidelines, it will take considerable time to get visible results and higher rankings. Now that being understood, let’s learn the various strategies you can leverage for your website’s SEO-friendly optimization process.
Want to make your website SEO-friendly? Implement a clean simple URL structure. When customers search for your website, it must be descriptive, easy to read and follow the latest search engine indexing practices. Having a well-structured URL helps increase rankings and user experience. When creating a URL, it must be in lowercase and dashes must be used to separate the words. Adding relevant keywords helps improve visibility.
2. Add Relevant Keywords
Incorporating keywords is one of the crucial SEO guidelines for website development when developing an SEO-friendly website. Adding such terms enables search engines to understand the context of your web content and display them whenever users input keywords as search terms. By conducting keyword research using tools such as Google Planner, Semrush, Moz, etc you can find the trending and related terms that users look up on the web.
3. Optimize Images
When it comes to improving website visibility and reach, optimizing content for SEO isn’t just enough but images have to be optimized. Luckily, there are various essential SEO guidelines for website which you can use to achieve your desired purpose. The images you plan to integrate must have an appropriate file name and should include keywords related to the content on the image. If the images are of large size, reducing it helps increase page loading speed.
4. Ensure Faster Loading Web Pages
Having slow-loading webpages? Say goodbye to getting organic traffic, higher rankings and reach. In case you don’t know, search engines only prefer websites that load faster and offer a positive satisfying user experience. It is difficult to achieve your long-term marketing goals if your website isn’t SEO-friendly but you can reverse it through several SEO guidelines for website development. This includes compressing images, implementing a CDN, switching to a better web hosting plan, enabling browser caching, etc.
5. Use Canonical Tags
There might be cases when your site has similar web pages with minor changes. In such a scenario, if you wish to have one of the ranked, this can be tricky as the search engines will have difficulty knowing which page is the main version. You can avoid this by adding canonical tags to the main webpage URL. This tells search engines that the webpage URL chosen is the primary version and the rest are its variations. This approach prevents duplicate content issues and saves the crawl budget.
6. Give Priority To Mobile-First Design
Before you ask why, just know that around 57% of the local search queries are done through mobile. So, if your website isn’t responsive across mobile devices, you lose more than half of your target audience. So instead of making a desktop website first and then optimizing it for mobile, start by building a website that is responsive and meets the SEO website guidelines simultaneously.
7. Switch To HTTPS
This one doesn’t need any explanation, does it? An insecure website is a big no-no in the online world. Security is one of the most important SEO friendly website design guidelines that has to be followed. Search engines always want to provide the best and most secure web pages for customer queries. Having the HTTPS protocol means that your site is secure. Getting an SSL certificate from a renowned web hosting provider and adding it to your site is the easiest way to get started.
Winding Up
As we have explained everything you need to know about custom website development including the various strategies, it is natural to have doubts regarding those and how they will work for your website. We would recommend implementing a trial and error phase and see which of them produces the intended results. If this feels tough to manage or you wish to learn more, it’s time to get connected with the best SEO agency in UAE. Ultimately, the key is to follow the guidelines stated by Google and implement the best strategies to make your website SEO-friendly and satisfying to users.
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