It is important for your search engine presence to build a website that is search engine friendly from the very start. Here is a list of 7 tips to help you gauge whether your site is search-engine friendly.
1. Research Your Keywords
Research the keywords that people type in a search engine when looking for the services or products you offer. This may not always be what you think so it is important to invest time into doing this or hire a professional to do your keyword research for you.
2. Don’t build an entirely Flash based website.
Although, it may look great, search engines can not index it properly. If you do use Flash, remember to also write text to accompany the Flash elements. The same goes for images, include them by all means, but make sure you name the image file describing what it is and include “alt” text that also describes exactly what the image is i.e. <img src=”…/name-of-image.jpg” alt=”text describing the image”>
3. Use the <Title> Tag to describe what the content of the page is about
The <Title> tag is HTML that displays the title of the page in the very top bar of the browser. It tells search engines exactly what your website / page is about. Use the keyword(s) you wish to rank for in the <Title> tag, as long as it is relevant to the page content.
4. Include your keywords in your content
Repeat the keywords you want to rank for several times in the first few lines of your page, but making sure it makes sense and reads naturally. Use your keyword(s) often throughout the rest of the page, but don’t overdo it.
5. Link your web pages using text links
Link to and from the internal pages of your website. If a piece of content you write is relevant to another blog post, link to it from within the body of your content, not just from the nav menu, footer or sidebar.
6. Make sure you have clean URLs
By this, I mean that they should not contain dynamically created characters. For example https://webcentric360.com/?id=386 is not ideal as search engines don’t read past characters like ?, & and =. Your URLs should tell you what the page is about such as https://webcentric360.com/7-quick-tips-building-search-engine-friendly-website/
7. Create regular new content
Search engines like fresh and original content so create new content on a daily basis, or at least weekly. Blogging is a great way of publishing regular content and in this day and age, I think that every website should have a blog.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but gives you a good basis on which to start building a search engine friendly website that will gradually move up in search engine rankings.