Each one of us has more or less the same goal. Yes, the means might be different, but the end is always the same. Can you guess what that goal is? I’m sure you can because you would also have the very same goal and that is to succeed.
Whether it is at school, at our work, in our personal lives, or with our children’s future, the goal is to always aim for the winning shot and succeeding. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Talking about our work, we could merely be an employee or we could be the owner. No matter our position, we would still be finding ways to become successful. Making our mark in a presentation or a sales pitch by getting the end result is what success feels like in the workplace.
For online businesses, success is often correlated to a heightened level of visibility on search engines. And that is quite understandable since that is what is going to bring in the traffic. So, how does a business owner achieve that?
The answer lies in Search Engine Optimisation or SEO if you prefer that.
The aim has to always be a success and building an SEO-friendly site is just the right means to achieve that. When I say SEO friendly, the inferred meaning is search engine friendly. We would recommend you make a checklist in order to boost your small business.
SEO-friendly development is the way of designing and developing a website so that a search engine can
- easily scour it;
- interpret its content;
- and index it in its database.
This way when a user wants to find something relevant to your business, the search engine displays your website, and consequently, you get higher traffic.
Now the question is, how do you design a website that checks all the boxes of SEO-friendliness? There is the obvious answer to taking on a digital marketing agency in Delhi. Since they are the experts in the domain, you will get the best results. However, if you still want to know how the experts do it or want to do it yourself, I have just the right techniques for you to follow. So, continue reading to know what they are.
Targeting keywords through your content
Any SEO expert worth his salt would tell you to focus on content when you are aiming for an SEO-friendly website. So, how do you focus on content? There are many ways to do that.
Keyword research
The first is to perform keyword research, extensively, to understand what your target audience would type into the search engine. Once you have that, then you’ll need to research some more for the topic that your audience may be interested in. Then you build your content based on the keywords and the topics you found in your research.
Strategic placement
Now comes the strategic part, you have to place the keywords a little sparingly. You cannot stuff your content with them. That is a big no-no for SEO content. You have to avoid keyword stuffing.
Long-tail keywords
So what should you emphasize more while targeting keywords? The answer is long-tail keywords. Simply put, these are keywords that are really long in the word count. So, why should you be targeting them? It’s because of their length. Because long keywords are quite sizable, it makes them unique. And their uniqueness helps your business stand out from the crowd.
Versatile content
A common mistake that many sites make is that they only focus on the content that would appear on their web pages. Now, this is a mistake that can cost you your precious standing on the search engine results page.
You should focus on the web pages, they are indeed crucial. However, you should also aim to make your content versatile. Blogs, images, videos, and even podcasts help in doing just that. So, start including these into your content strategy and infuse them with the appropriate keywords.
Duplicacy
Another thing to focus on is duplicate content. That also puts a damper on your SEO strategy. Duplicate content, even if it is not an exact replica, can affect your rankings on a search engine.
Creating a responsive design
After sorting the most crucial part of your SEO strategy, that is content, you should start focusing on your design. The goal is to make it responsive.
Responsive design refers to the one that can adapt itself to its environment. For instance, if you have built a responsive website, it would be easy for me to view it on my desktop, on my smartphone, and even on my tablet. The website would be easily able to adjust to the screen size it is being viewed in.
How does this help you with search engines?
Let’s see, Google experiences searches that are in billions every day. Now, all those billions of searches aren’t going to be typed into Google’s search bar from a desktop. A high proportion of them come. from smartphones and tablets.
So, you may be able to master the keyword play and land your website on the top of the Google search page. However, if your design isn’t responsive to the user with a smartphone screen, you might as well not have been there at all. He would switch to the result which would have a design that would align to his screen.
Therefore, if your design isn’t responsive, your site won’t be SEO-friendly.
Remembering the header tags
Next come to the header tags, which may not seem as important, but they are pretty significant.
What are header tags?
They are basically headings given to individual sections of content. And they need to have your keywords to make the content seem relevant to Google.
Let’s take this blog for instance.
My focus keyword was SEO-friendly website and you’ll find that in the title itself. Now whenever, this is typed into Google, there is a higher chance my blog would appear.
So, H1 is decided. Then came the H2s. For this blog, the goal was to give out clear strategies for the focus keyword. Therefore, all those strategies become the H2s.
There are also H3s and H4s, which should also have your keywords, but the less essential ones.
What more?
Another thing you should understand is that these header tags are also necessary to break up the content. This helps the search engines and the readers to scan through it and understand what the content is talking about. Paragraph after paragraph without any breakup becomes mundane for the readers to read.
Again for this blog, one of my H2s had a lot of information to talk about. So, I segregated it into smaller H3s, making the information easier to scan.
Header tags give you structure and organization, both of which are important for SEO-friendly development.
Adding internal links
Then you would need to start adding internal links. These are links in your pages that will take the search engines and the readers to different, yet relevant, pages within your site.
If you remember, at the beginning of this blog, I talked about search engines indexing your website into their database. Every search engine does that, however, they are often too diligent about it. This means not all your site pages may get indexed by a search engine.
Internal links come in very handy here.
When you add an internal link to a page, it starts getting noticed. All the keywords added there would help Google add the same to its database so that it can pop up when someone needs it.
However, you must remember that your links have to be relevant to the content. You can’t just add a link anywhere you want. It has to be embedded in the content’s natural flow, only then would you be able to reap the benefits internal links bring with them.
Conclusion
These four are some of the most crucial strategies for SEO-friendly development that can actually change your standing on search engines.
Of course, there are so many other practices as well. To name a few, you can consider an XML site map, optimizing meta descriptions and off-page SEO means as well.
Whatever you do, the goal should be to succeed. So, start addressing the areas on your website that could need SEO-friendly polishing and make your presence known to the search engines. Good luck!
Description
Creating an SEO-friendly website can change a business’s overall market position for the better. Learn how you can be a part of that change