Designing an SEO-friendly Website – What are the Strategies to Adopt?
Have you ever wondered why websites which look great usually suck with their SEO? Well, you need to know that in order to be a true king in search engine result pages; you will need a website that is more than just search-optimised or well-designed. You will probably require tons of quality and authoritative links, social mentions, co-citations and citations. The main issue with these important ranking factors is that they need a lot of work to achieve and they’re also hard to achieve. This is the reason why majority of the websites don’t have an SEO-friendly design.
What are you supposed to do? Should you give your tasks to an SEO company where their designers will help you in designing the most search-optimised website? How about knowing few strategies so that you could stay informed and educated?
SEO-friendly on-page optimization
Being a part of this SEO industry, you would know that this includes the strategies which can be under the control of the owner of the website. These are the main strategies which play a role in deciding how the search engines crawl and how they relate to your content. Here are few on-page strategies:
- Doing keyword research, choosing the best keywords and using them at the right places
- Designing a URL structure which is optimized both for search engines and users
- Using header tags, title tags, meta-description tags and image-alt tags in a proper way
- Creating a link structure, navigation and an information architecture which let the search engines crawl on your website efficiently and aligns with the expectations of the users
- Using multiple content types like images, lists, videos and text
- Designing a site that is visually appealing and that which represents your brand
- Creating a responsive design for your website so that it works on all platforms
SEO-friendly off-page optimization
This includes the management of the marketing part and the amplification of the site. This kind of management includes social media mentions and earning links which can boost the authority of your website, thereby leading to an increase in traffic and SEO rankings. Few such strategies may include:
- Analyzing your competition to better know the strategies that the competitors are using in order to rank higher in search results
- Obtaining inbound links from the websites which carry high authority by the search engines
- Using anchor texts which are rich in keywords and adding them to your inbound links
White hat SEO techniques
All the above listed strategies are called White Hat as they all increase the value of the SEO of your website; they offer you great designing experience, increase traffic, rankings and sales from other search engines. Embracing White Hat SEO techniques ensures a sustainable and ethical approach to optimizing your website for search engines.
Black hat SEO techniques
These black hat techniques were used in the past to obtain high rankings pretty fast. But the search engines have upgraded their algorithms to find out such techniques and they’re continuously using machine learning to manipulate SERPs. Link farming, selling links, buying links, keyword stuffing, keyword spamming, article spinning and cloaking are some techniques of black-hat SEO.
Therefore, if you’re trying to design a website which is SEO-friendly, you may take into account both on-page and off-page optimization strategies that are given above.