First of all, let me clarify a very simple and a very much misunderstood aspect of. SEO is not a process you do and see results overnight. It is slow but eventually pays off and the results can last very long. It can take years to build up the authority of a domain and the rankings of pages within a domain can be very inconsistent and random. However, if you build your website from the ground-up by adhering to the rules laid by the big name search engines, Google in this instance, you will be making your website more authoritative, then a lot of the unpredictability of how a site ranks will be eliminated. In this way, your site will appear more ‘natural’ to Google in how it ranks and responds to search queries.
In other words, the only true test of how authoritative a site is is how authoritative Google thinks it is. The more authoritative a site is, the more the other search engines and your human visitors indirectly will reward it with higher rankings. There are tools that can be used to measure a website’s authority. We will be addressing that topic later on in this article.
What Is Making A Website Search Engine Friendly?
It is the process by which you can make the search engines to love and keep coming back to crawl your website because of the trust they have. They “know” that they will find valuable information to serve whenever a person does a search. Now, in order to gain this trust, your site must meet certain criteria.
1. Do Keyword Research
Before you ever start to build a website, the first thing you need to do is figure out what you want the site to be about. You start by conducting keyword research. The next step would be to write content around your chosen set of keywords. In that way, the search engines will know what your website is all about from the information you provide them. Keyword research can be tough to do and can be easy. All depend on a number of factors.
Typically, I like to be meticulous while conducting keyword research for my clients. Sometimes, the whole process may take up to two weeks and sometimes less. This as I said earlier on can be a pain in the butt and that is why I recommend asking an SEO consultant agency to conduct your keyword research for you. It can be a live saver believe me.
2. Use Search Engine Friendly URLs
This is also a very important aspect. Make it easier for search engines bots to crawl your website and they are going to love it. This is done by making the URLs friendly. Here are a few examples:
Example 1: yourdomain/%20/vsyvsurofh?
Example 2: yourdomain/red-apples
Example 1 does not communicate anything to anybody. This is an unfriendly URL because as a human cannot decipher what the URL is about, so the search engine spider also will not.
With example 2, you immediately know that this website is about red apples. Believe it or not, so do the search engine spiders.
Fortunately, there are tools that will give you suggestions about the possible configurations of the URLs. This is true if you build your website with Content Management Software (CMS) such as WordPress which is the most popular and the most versatile.
3. Increase Your Website Speed
You should try as much as you can to make your site load as fast as possible. A website that is taking forever to load is going to discourage even the most persistent visitors talking less of search bots who spider millions of websites every single day. If your site is not fast enough, everyone including search engines will be reluctant to come back and in so doing, you may be leaving money on the table should you per chance monetize your website.
4. Create Sitemaps And Submit To Search Engines.
A sitemap is where all the pages of your website are listed each with its most important metrics like title, tags, etc. Sitemaps contain information about your website which the search engines understand. There are tools that you can use to generate these sitemaps. Google has a free tool in the search console where you can submit your sitemaps for the search giant to crawl and thus have a complete view of your website. If anything is missing, the tool will let you know so that you can make modifications. Cool isn’t it?
I have listed above some of the ways I have found to help my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effort. They all involve a lot of work but once done you will notice a change in the results when you do a search. It will also help you be aware of what pages you have to focus on in order to improve the rankings.
