Considerations in Creating an SEO-Friendly Website

SEO – or search engine optimization – may sound like a loaded term to the average person, but you can very simply define it as taking proactive steps for your website to consistently be on a search engine’s first page of search results. The said page number in a search engine is a coveted spot as 75% of Internet users don’t bother going to search results page two onwards. That’s why every website ever built wants to own a spot there, and for you to do this, create an SEO-friendly website by considering the following:

1.      Compatibility across mobile devices

Most Internet users access the World Wide Web using their mobile devices these days. If you didn’t consider mobile Internet users when you first created your website, its design and layout may look bad on a smartphone or tablet despite appearing to be just fine when viewed on a desktop computer.

Therefore, when creating a website, you should prioritize compatibility across mobile devices by incorporating responsive web design into your code. Note though that different smartphones have different screen sizes, and the same goes for tablets and smartphone-tablet hybrids. You should thus test your website across more than just one mobile device before going live.

2.      Alt text for images

It isn’t safe to assume that every Internet user can see or read the contents of your website. Some of them may be visually impaired or illiterate that they rely on screen readers that relay to them whatever information it contains.

So when adding pictures to your website, you should make sure to include alt text for each of them. The alt text in each of your images should accurately describe them. For instance, if you added a photo of a Shiba Inu dog barking at a passerby in one of your website’s posts, its alt text should be something like “Shiba Inu dog barking at a passerby.”

Keep your images’ alt texts concise that they can convey what visitors to your website need to know about it without using too many words.

3.      Keywords that your website’s visitors use

Internet users may stumble upon your site after they typed specific keywords in their preferred search engine and your website appeared on the first page of search results. But before we talk about the importance of keywords in SEO, one concept that needs to be discussed first is niche.

What is your website all about? You should figure out what niche your website should specialize in instead of trying to cover too many categories at once. Make up your mind as to what you’re passionate about that your website’s visitors can relate to. For example, if you’re passionate about Italian food and you think that there are others out there who share the same passion as yours, create a website about Italian cuisine.

After determining your website’s niche, place yourself in the shoes of your visitors and imagine what keywords they’re most likely to enter in their preferred search engine. Following the Italian food example above, your website’s visitors would most likely use “Neapolitan pizza,” “calzone,” “creamy carbonara” and other dishes originating from Italy. Once done, start crafting content for your website that uses those keywords.

However, you’ll want to avoid inserting too many instances of the same keyword in a piece of content for your website as search engines don’t take keyword stuffing kindly. Place keywords across your website’s content strategically and sparingly.

4.      Social media integration

As most people nowadays have at least one social media account, their default tendency whenever they come across something interesting or entertaining from a website is to share it on their social media platform of choice.

Your website’s content should thus be shareable across different social media platforms. As there are so many of these platforms all over the world, you’ll want to include only major ones such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and anything else that most of your website’s visitors might be using.

Conclusion

Despite all major search engines offering the ability to tweak how many search results to display per page, most Internet users leave it to the default number of ten. After all, it’s easier to check ten search results than 50 or 100 per page. However, as already mentioned earlier, most Internet users never venture past page one of a search engine’s list of results. You’ll thus want your website to secure a slot on the first page, and you can accomplish that by taking note of the above-listed considerations when creating an SEO-friendly website. If you need further help, visit napera.com or type “serpco seo” in your preferred search engine.