10 Things You Need To Know About SEO When Building A Website
What is the point of a website? You want people to learn about what you offer in hopes they will reach out and use your company’s services.
How are they supposed to do this if they cannot find your website in the first place? This is why it is essential to consider search engine optimization (SEO) when building your website. It covers a variety of methods to help get your website to rank higher in a search result.
Why Do You Need a Website?
We live in a digital world, and you need to have a website if you want to have a successful business. That means you also have to compete against a vast number of other websites and their keywords. Sites listed on the first page of the search results have the highest click-through rate. Over 92% of searches happen through Google’s search engine.
Google-ready content plays a critical role in your website’s success. The content also must meet the needs of your customers. Here are ten ways SEO can help you achieve a website that is both Google-ready and customer-friendly.
1. Page Speed
The time it takes a page to load is one of the most important factors in getting people to engage with your site. If the page takes too long to load, they’ll just leave. People don’t want to sit around waiting for a website to load when multiple other options are available. Google also uses page speed as a ranking factor. If a website loads fast, then Google will show it higher than a slow-loading website.
2. Valuable Content
Your content should have the answers to their questions or provide a solution to their problem. This will keep them on your page and bring more conversions. Writing captivating content for people while considering the web crawlers helps you rank well with search engines.
It doesn’t stop with the launch of your new website. Content needs to be updated over time. Adding quality content to your website keeps your readers engaged and assists other SEO strategies. These include backlinking and incorporating keywords into your website. This provides more opportunities for people to be able to find your website.
3. Important Information First
A summary of your most important content should be near the top of your page, above the fold. This encourages people to stay on the page and find out more. It also clues crawlers into the relevance of your content to searchers’ queries. People tend to be impatient when they are searching for an answer to a question. They want to find the answer as quickly as possible. Reading only one paragraph and finding a good answer instead of skimming an entire page is preferable to most people.
4. Strong Headers
This helps organize your content and make it clear to people and search spiders where to find the information they’re looking for. Always have an H1, the top-level heading, to tell readers what the page is about. The H1 should have the most important keyword you want to be found for. It is one of the first things to be read by bots as well as your potential customer. They should be able to tell they are in the right place right away. Also use H2 and H3 headers to break up blocks of text, making the page easier to read.
5. High Traffic Keywords
Choose the right keywords to focus on. This includes long-tail keywords, or phrases, customers are using in their searches. More and more people are using voice search on their devices. This makes it more essential to use long-tail keywords in your content. There are several SEO platforms you can use to research keywords and search queries. This helps you know you are targeting relevant keywords for your customers. Choosing the right keywords is vital for multiple aspects of SEO. If you are trying to sell a roof, you don’t want to rank in a search for a hotel.
6. Alternative Text For Images
Images help make a website visually appealing. Adding appropriate keywords to your alternative text for images helps Google understand your images and increases accessibility. It allows screen readers to give accurate information about the picture or graphic instead of just saying “image.” This is extremely helpful to visually impaired individuals.
Not everyone will be able to see this strategy in action, but it is still important. It is an additional place to add content and essential keywords. You can describe a photo on the back end of the website to help Google understand it.
7. Internal and External Links
Link to other helpful pages on your site (internal links) or relevant content on other sites (external links), using descriptive anchor text. Backlinking helps build up your credibility to potential customers as well as search engine crawlers. It also boosts your website’s search visibility and position ranking. It is helpful to link to other websites and have other websites link back to your website. A backlink from a popular website with high authority is worth more than a backlink from a website with less authority.
8. Meta Descriptions
Write appealing meta descriptions unique to each page to entice users to click on your link in the search results. A meta description gives a brief explanation of each website page and helps it show in a search result. It is there to help convince someone your website has the information they are searching for.
9. Simple URL Structure
Use a straightforward, easy-to-understand URL structure. It needs to be friendly to both humans and search engines. A link should clearly show what page it leads to. If the page talks about your company history, the URL structure should be /history or /about-us. Having a random string of numbers and letters in your URL doesn’t help anyone know what is on the page. This is beneficial for both SEO and User Experience (UX). The simple URL shows relevancy to a search engine and a human.
10. Mobile-Friendly Website
Your design should be responsive and mobile-friendly, working as well on mobile devices as on desktops. Almost 60% of searches happen on a mobile device, so your website needs to perform well there.
It is vital to incorporate all of these different SEO strategies when building a website. Each one gets taken into consideration by search engine algorithms. It is not enough to just focus on one of the ten strategies listed above. If you cannot incorporate all of them on your own, consider enlisting the expertise of a marketing agency. Search engine optimization is critical for people to find your website. If they can’t find your website, they can’t contact you about your services. This is not an area you want to hold back on. Connect with us if you’d like help developing the SEO for your website.
