A Quick Guide To Creating An SEO-Friendly Website

Investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective ways to boost traffic to your Australian business website. If you do it properly.

In the online space, maximizing traffic to your website is everything. It creates a higher chance of succeeding with any goal you could set for your website. Some examples include: acquiring new customers, increasing conversions, reaching a wider audience, and improving brand recognition.

Follow the nine steps listed below to ensure your website will always be SEO-friendly.

Choose A Good Domain Name

The first step to creating a website is finding a powerful, memorable domain name. It can be whatever you want, provided it’s available. However, the domain name presents a great opportunity to introduce an element of SEO into the website.

Your main options are to include one of your main keywords or use your domain name to describe your product or service. This will help both search engines and people to understand what it is that you do. Alternatively, make your domain name something that people will remember.

Pay Attention To Site Navigation

On the web, people don’t have time. They have options.

If someone visits your website and can’t find what they’re looking for, the chances are that they’ll opt to look elsewhere. This is why site navigation is so important. You need to make a visitors’ session as easy and intuitive as possible.

The main sections of your website (home page, about us, catalog, product categories, and the like) should be included in your site’s navigation. It’s also a good idea to include any major subheadings of each section, just to make the search a bit easier.

There’s no single method to doing this—the only hard rule is that it should be easy to understand. That said, working with a professional development agency like Melbourne web design can be beneficial if you want advice from experienced developers.

Optimize Your Website’s Performance

Website performance is one of those things that most people don’t notice until it becomes glaringly noticeable. And by that point, it’s often too late to undo the damage it’s caused. This might sound confusing, but you’ll understand in a moment.

Specifically, performance refers to how fast your website loads. This is typically a combination of the speeds offered by your web hosting service and optimizing your site to load quickly. Always remember that a slow-loading website can lead to page abandonment, resulting in fewer customers and conversions.

To put this into perspective, research has shown that you can lose over 40% of potential visitors if your load time is more than three seconds. So, regularly perform performance testing and optimization to keep your site in its best condition.

Make Your Site Desktop And Mobile Friendly

As of early 2022, mobile has been responsible for just over half of all web traffic. In other words, it’s safe to bet that many people will be viewing your website from their smartphones or tablets. Mobile-friendly means SEO-friendly.

Unfortunately, search engines don’t automatically know how your website should appear on mobile devices. Unless you create a mobile-optimized version of your site, visitors will be presented with a default desktop version. Which is usually uncomfortable to navigate and can lead people to click away.

A good rule to follow for developing a website yourself is optimizing for mobile before desktop. Mobile to desktop is generally an easier transition than desktop to mobile.

Publish Valuable, Original, High-Quality Content

Content is one of the biggest deciding factors in your search engine rankings. Search engines avoid duplicate or plagiarized content. They want to direct users to unique, useful, and high-quality content.

Avoid the trap of trying to write only for search engines. Keyword stuffing is a thing of the past. Now, content written for readers is content that performs. You must write to grab readers’ attention so they read till the end of the page. Furthermore, the reader should feel like they’ve found the answers they were looking for by the time they reach the end.

Any content you publish should be easy to read, easy to scan, and centered on providing the information the reader is promised. Some general rules to follow when writing is the following:

• Avoid big words;
• Use active voice wherever possible;
• Create clear headings and subheadings;
• Prioritize concise page layout; and so on.

Pay Attention To Your URLs

This is relatively straightforward. People can view your URL and use it to decide if they’re interested in your page’s content. Some search engines will even display a simplified version alongside your meta data in search results. Ensure that your URLs and URL slugs are relatively simple and describe whatever’s on the page they link to.

Add A Sitemap

On-page site navigation is how people get through your website. Search engines require a different means, in the form of an XML sitemap. There’s no reason not to include one, as it can never damage your SEO—a sitemap will only benefit you.

Your sitemap is a document you submit alongside your website that tells search engines which pages are present and how to reach them. It’s literally a map for search engines to find things across your site.

Another benefit of a sitemap is that you can add additional metadata to tell search engines more about the content contained within specific pages, which can further help your SEO.

Create A ‘robots.txt’ File

You can think of ‘robots.txt’ as an instructional file that informs web crawlers and search engines which pages they may or may not access on your website. Left unchecked, these tools may decide to crawl every possible page.

If you have any pages you specifically don’t want web crawlers accessing, it’s a good idea to create a ‘robots.txt’ file. You may also include one if there are pages that aren’t necessary for SEO and would only increase website load time if crawled (which you’d rather avoid).

Optimize Keyword Usage

Although the days when keywords were everything are now gone, they still play a significant role in SEO. It’s worth investing time into finding the best keywords for your product, service, and niche. But avoid keyword overuse and focus on strategic keyword placement instead.

Nowadays, finding effective keywords often results from using keyword searching tools. The keywords to look for will be those that are relevant to you, have search traffic potential, and aren’t so saturated that they’re difficult to rank for.

Conclusion

SEO-friendly websites aren’t a naturally occurring phenomenon. They’re created on purpose. By people who’ve invested the time and effort to make it work.

An SEO strategy is something you should start planning as early as possible. Keep records of your actions at every step to prepare for future changes and learn from past mistakes. And finally, remember that if something isn’t working at any point, it can always be adapted to test something new.