7 Tips for Creating an SEO-Friendly Site

With so many people clicking on organic search listings, it’s vital that you use search engine optimization (SEO) to help your site rank higher in the search results. By investing in creating an SEO-friendly website, you will rank better in the search results and drive more traffic to your page.

On this page, we’ll provide you with seven tips for creating an SEO-friendly website that ranks better in the search results. If you aren’t sure where to get started with SEO, call our SEO web design company today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about creating a comprehensive SEO plan for your business.

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1. Use responsive design to connect with mobile users

When you’re trying to create SEO-friendly website design, it’s challenging to know what elements are crucial to helping your business drive success. Responsive design is one of those vital components of driving success for your business. If you want to create an SEO-friendly website, you must integrate responsive design into your site.

Responsive design allows your website to adapt to whatever device a user is using. Whether they access your site on a mobile phone, tablet, or desktop, they will get the version of your website that is best for their device.

So, why is responsive design a vital part of SEO-friendly website design?

Each device has a different sized screen, which means that your website must adapt to fit those screens. If you don’t adjust for mobile devices, these users won’t have a positive experience on your site.

Imagine accessing a desktop version of your website on a smartphone. Your website would be scaled tiny on the device. Users would struggle to read the text, see images, and click on links.

It’s not a positive experience for your audience. Your audience will leave your site quickly and turn to a competitor with a site that is better optimized.

You want leads to remain on your site longer because it sends a positive signal to Google. Google will rank your website higher in the search results because it will believe that your site is relevant to the user’s search intent.

Overall, the importance of SEO-friendly websites is that they keep traffic on your page longer, which will help boost your website’s ranking in the search results. To create a better-optimized site, integrate responsive design into your website’s design. It will help you create a more SEO-friendly website design that enables you to keep leads on your page longer.

2. Create website content to target valuable keywords

Content creation is an integral part of your website. When you create content, you help drive traffic to your site and get leads to engage on your site. Not only does it help establish yourself as an authority in your field, but it also helps you target valuable keywords to drive interested leads to your page.

To start creating content, you must choose your topic. Choosing your topic is where keyword selection comes into play. Keywords trigger your website to appear in relevant search results.

To find the right key terms, conduct keyword research. This research allows you to find relevant vital phrases for your SEO listing and see the value of those terms.

You will focus on long-tail keywords. These are keywords that contain three or more words like “textile manufacturing company.”

Long-tail keywords drive better results for your content. These key terms are specific, so more valuable traffic will find your website.

Once you have your phrases selected, you’ll choose the right format for your content. You can create blogs, videos, infographics, and ebooks to provide your audience with valuable information.

After you pick your format, you can start creating your content. You’ll want to ensure that your content is educational and easy to understand. It’s important to remember that you’re creating content for your audience, so you must write, direct, and design content that is easy for them to understand.

By targeting keywords within your content, you’ll help your business appear in more relevant search results. Appearing in more relevant results enables you to drive more traffic to your website and get your site to rank higher in the search results.

If you want to create a more SEO-friendly website, integrate keywords into your pages. It will help your pages appear in the right search results, which will improve your page’s overall performance. Keyword integration is just one of the ways you can make your website SEO-friendly.

3. Optimize header tags to help search engines better understand your pages

If you want to know how to make your website SEO-friendly, start by optimizing your header tags. Header tags are the headings that designate the start of a section. The title of this section is a header!

To start optimizing your headers, integrate your most important keywords into them. For the title of your page, you’ll want to incorporate your most important keyword into the title.

This integration helps Google understand the context of your page, so it’s necessary to integrate your most important keyword into the title to ensure you rank for that keyword.

For smaller headings, like H2s and H4s, you can integrate other essential keywords to help you rank for those phrases too.

Headers play an essential role on your page. They tell your audience what comes next and what they can expect to see.

You don’t want to use headers to emphasize phone numbers or facts. Headers are meant to break up sections and make it easy for your audience to digest the information.

For example, let’s say you’re writing an article on how to make a pie. Let’s look at how your descending headings may look:

• H2: 5 Easy Steps for Making a Delicious Pie
• H2: Step 1: make your crust
• H3: Making crust from scratch
• H4: Using boxed crust

As you can see, each heading breaks down the process into smaller, more digestible pieces. It prevents readers from being bogged down by blocks of text and helps make it easy for skimming articles.

If you want to build an SEO-friendly website, start by creating a heading structure for your pages that makes it easy for your leads to read. If your pages are organized and easy to read, you’ll keep leads on your website longer.

4. Use internal linking to help search engines crawl and index your pages

As you learn more about how to make your website SEO-friendly, don’t forget to focus on internal linking on your site. Internal linking is an easily overlooked part of SEO. This practice helps search engines discover new pages on your website and index them.

You may have awesome pages with valuable content on your website, but Google may not be able to find it. Google won’t always find every page you have your website, so you need to help Google find them. Internal linking helps Google discover these pages and index them in the search results.

If you want to use internal links on your site, use them correctly. You don’t want to add links to your pages randomly to get those pages indexed. The pages need to be relevant to the topic and anchor text you’re using on the page.

To see success with internal linking, use robust and relevant anchor text. Your anchor text gives a sneak preview to the context of your link.

In this example, the phrase “anchor text” leads to a website about the importance of anchor text. Not only is the text relevant, but the link is also related. The anchor text and internal link are connected, creating a harmonious way for Google to index that page.

If you want to build an SEO-friendly website, add internal links to help Google discover and index more pages on your website. Use our free links counter tool to determine how many internal links you have on a page of your website and start from there.

5. Optimize meta descriptions to boost site clicks in search results

When you search on Google, the first thing you see is the title of the page. Underneath the title, you see a small paragraph description that gives you a sneak preview of the page. This small paragraph is your meta description.

Let’s take a look at an example of a meta description from Home Depot:

In this meta description, the search query was “how to fix a leaking toilet.” Home Depot’s meta description is an excellent example of how to utilize this little descriptive space to rank for keywords while providing your audience with a valuable summary.

The meta description tells you exactly what to expect. You know you will get a step-by-step guide to fix a leaking toilet. If you click on the listing, the meta description is accurate — you’ll find a video and step-by-step instructions on how to fix a leaking toilet.

Your meta description should be relevant and fill as much of the space as possible. You have about 150 characters for your meta description before three dots appear and your text is cut off. This cutoff means that people won’t see information beyond the 150 characters, and your information may get cut off at an awkward or crucial part of your description.

It may take some time to create the perfect meta description that is descriptive and fits in the character limit, but it’s well worth the effort because it will help you earn more clicks and web traffic.

6. Focus on readability to keep people on your site longer

As you create your SEO-friendly website design and optimize your page, it’s easy to get lost in the design and technical aspects of your website. When you do these optimizations, don’t forget to focus on the overall appearance of your site. Most importantly, focus on the readability of your site to ensure your audience can read your information.

If you have a beautifully designed website, it won’t matter if people can’t read your information. People come to your site for information. While your design sets the first impression, your content determines if that first impression remains positive.

A big part of SEO isn’t technical, but rather, humanistic. Google wants to promote websites that please users and prove relevant to their needs. If your audience can’t read your content to determine its relevance, you will fail to have a user-friendly website, which impacts your SEO friendliness.

To prevent this mistake from happening, ensure that the content on your page is easily readable. Start by choosing the right text size for your page. Generally, your page text should be 16pt or larger to ensure your audience can easily read it without zooming in to the page.

Second, make sure you pick the right font color. Bright yellow text can be complicated to read, especially on a white background. Choose fonts that stand out on your background to ensure your audience can read your content.

Aside from the font, you’ll also want to format your content to be easy for your audience to read. Use headings to break up long pages and integrate bullet-pointed lists to promote skimming. These are both great elements to make it easy for your audience to read (or skim) your pages.

If you have pages with an abundance of information, break it up into smaller paragraphs. Your audience is more likely to read a page with two to three sentences per paragraph, rather than a page with six to seven sentences per paragraph. Long paragraphs can be intimidating and discourage your audience from reading your content.

These are just a few of the steps you can take to create better readability on your site. When you improve readability on your site, you create a more user-friendly and SEO-friendly website for your business.

7. Improve page load time by optimizing images on your website

Your website’s load time strongly impacts your SEO friendliness. If you don’t have a fast-loading website for users to access information, you risk leads bouncing from your site to go to a competitor’s site.

When you’re trying to improve your site’s load time, look at the images on your website. Pictures are a great addition to any site, but they can bog down your site with large file sizes. To improve your site’s load time, compress image sizes to help your site load quicker.

By compressing your image size, you will improve your image load time, which will enhance your site’s load time. Since the files won’t be as large, it won’t take your site as long to load them. It improves the overall load time of your website.

Create an SEO-friendly website today

If you want to drive more traffic online for your business, you must create an SEO-friendly website.

When your site is friendly to search engines, you’ll appear in more relevant search results and boost traffic on your website. SEO takes time to implement and show results, so you will need to spend time planning your SEO strategy.

If you don’t have the time to dedicate to your SEO strategy, our team at WebFX can help. We have over 28 years of experience creating SEO campaigns that drive valuable results for our clients. Check out our 1,100 client testimonials that showcase the excellent work we do for our clients!

Are you ready to start optimizing your SEO strategy to reach more valuable leads? Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our customized SEO strategies.