What exactly is an SEO friendly website? Actually, there are a lot of ways but for now we’ll just focus on established techniques which are easy to implement, effective and makes search engines love crawling your site.
1. Incorporate social media
Have you seen websites with social sharing buttons on websites? Those are not just there to get more shares and likes but it also indicates to search engines how valuable your content is. These social signals play a significant role in organic SEO.
Implementing a mobile site puts you ahead of your competition. If your website doesn’t look good or is hard to navigate on a smartphone, visitors will move on to one that captures their attention.
Popular search engines like Google and Bing considers your website’s authority on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest and LinkedIn for ranking among other sites. Thus, it is recommended to encourage your visitors to share your content to their social media accounts. You can use a plugin like Sumo Me [https://sumome.com/app/share] which has a social media share bar that is mobile optimized and easy to set-up.
2. Make your site load faster
Site speed is one important factor that search engines considers in ranking websites that’s why you should try your best to improve it. One simple solution is caching your site. It’s actually very simple to do.You’ll just have to install the WP Super Cache plug-in. Just follow WPBeginner’s tutorial [https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-install-and-setup-wp-super-cache-for-beginners/] on how to set it up. The plug-in would save a copy of your pages so that it doesn’t have to load from your server every time someone visits your site.
Making your site load faster is not only good for search engines but for your visitors, as well. Let’s face it, who would want to browse a site that takes forever to load?
3. Optimize your images
Everybody knows a picture is worth a thousand words…to readers. To the search engine robot crawling army, the value is far less.Search bots don’t see the image so they rely on alt text to know what the image is about. Alt text describes the image and you can put your keywords here too.
While not supplying your images with alt-text that is genuine and descriptive can hurt you, there just isn’t much to gain from overloading your site with images especially with the ones with large file size.
Use an image editor to resize your image. It will also help reduce your site loading time. As mentioned earlier, the faster your site loads, the better it is for search engines and your visitors.
4. Change your permalink structure
A permalink is the url to your website’s posts or pages. By default, WordPress uses permalink like this:
https://www.yourdomain.com/?=168. The ideal permalink is: https://www.yourdomain.com/post-name
It is easier for your readers to understand and easier to remember too when someone needs to reference your site.
Just log-on to your WordPress dashboard then go to Settings>Permalinks and choose Post name to set this up on your site.
Although using keyword in your permalink doesn’t get that much attention from Google anymore, it is still beneficial to put relevant keywords there so your readers can easily figure out what the page is about and not just see some random numbers.
5. Test and code website to make mobile friendly
Developing a mobile friendly site means creating a site that’s elastic enough to display nicely on whatever device your end user is viewing it on. Business owners are pursuing mobile web development to ensure their site is optimized for smartphone display and connecting with their target audiences wherever they are. Optimizing your site for mobile usage means your product, service, and company is available to your customers when they are on the go. You can test your website to see if it is mobile friendly on Google’s developer site here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/.
6. Integrate XML sitemap
A sitemap list all the pages of your website. It is designed to help both your web visitors and search engines to navigate the site. Search engine crawlers use the sitemap to index the pages of your site; therefore, it’s essential that you set this up. We recommend installing the plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast on your site. Once installed, it would automatically generate an xml sitemap of your website.
Another reason to install this plugin is it has great features that can help optimize your website. It is such a great SEO plugin that we need to create a separate post about it in the future. Suffice it to say that you need to install this plugin.
These tips can help make your website SEO friendly and increase your chance to appear in search results but it doesn’t guarantee you any traffic. Good quality and relevant content is still what makes people come back to your site. If you are looking for SEO consulting, we can help you gain targeted traffic and quality leads to your website. Contact us for a free consultation.
