What is an SEO Friendly Website?
In simple terms, an SEO-friendly website makes it easy for search engine crawlers to assess the website and get a good understanding of its structure and content.
Let’s explore how to make SEO friendly websites and the most important characteristics of one:
1. Unique Title and Descriptions for all Pages
For an SEO-friendly website, all its web pages should have their own unique meta titles and descriptions. The titles usually range between 50-60 characters, and the descriptions can go up to 155 characters. These titles are crucial for search engine indexing, as they precisely tell visitors what the webpage is about.
2. Clean URL Structure
The URL of your webpage must be clean and follow the best practices for search engine indexing. For permanent links, you must ensure that they are all lower case, descriptive, separated by dashes, and possibly contain keywords organically for more visibility.
3. Fast Loading Webpages
No one wants to open a webpage that is too slow to load. To make an SEO-friendly website, you must ensure that a thorough SEO audit is conducted on your website to find out what can be done to improve the loading speed of your pages. Activities like image optimization can help you in increasing the page loading speed and give your website an advantage over the slower websites for the ranking algorithms.
4. Unique Content
You must ensure that the content on all your pages is unique and not plagiarized. Search engines flag websites with plagiarized content and this can significantly reduce your website’s SEO friendliness.
5. Optimized Images
Website images with a large size can increase the page loading speed, which is not a good thing for your website. You must ensure that your images are optimized and also add alt text for the search engine crawlers to understand what the image is about.
6. Create Proper Content Structure
You must ensure that your website has a proper content structure, as it makes it easy to index the website. The general structure of your webpage should have these elements:
- Header
- H1 Tag or Page Title
- Content with Subheadings (H1, H2, H3… tags for well-structured content distribution)
- Author Bio/Information, Sharing Options
- Footer
7. Responsive Website
Your website’s pages should be responsive on any device they are visited on. You must fix any discrepancies if your website or pages are unresponsive on any type of device, to keep its SEO health intact.
8. Internal Linking
Internal linking creates a well-rounded map of your website for search engine crawlers. It helps crawlers in associating relevant web pages together and creating a strong internal architecture to boost your website’s SEO friendliness.
9. Mobile-friendly
The website should be optimized for mobile devices to provide a seamless user experience across all devices. This is also important for search engine rankings, as mobile-friendliness is now a key factor in search engine algorithms.