Surprisingly enough, creating a search engine friendly website is actually easier than creating a site that is not search friendly. You’ll probably find it to be a mostly common sense based approach. And while the site itself is a major part of the overall SEO strategy to achieving quality traffic levels, there’s a bit more to it.
1. Make Sure The Navigation And Link Structure Works.
This is important, because without an effective navigation and site link structure plan in hand, neither human visitors or search engines are efficiently able to move through your site to get the big picture. Obviously, that is not a very good scenario at all. The site needs to flow in an organized way—home pages links to main category pages, main category pages link to downwards to sub pages, and so on.
2. Start with your content in mind.
Many folks attempt to build the website first and then fill it with content. This is kind of a backwards strategy, as the content is what will end up drawing the visitors in. Think of the keywords you want your website to be found for via a search engine search and use these keywords to plan your content and page structure. Then, develop and build the website around the content.
3. Double check all parts of the site.
This means ensuring that your written content is grammatically correct, spell-checked, and as perfectly proofed as possible. That’s the obvious part. But it’s also vital to make sure all site links actually go somewhere (and to the place that they’re supposed to go). Broken links are a serious turnoff to search engine spiders. The site’s code should be reviewed as well—this is where it can be helpful to use standards-compliant code and the correct tools to verify compliance. It will catch the mistakes.
4. Use images wisely.
Using appropriate images throughout the content of your website is a great way to supplement the content while adding some supporting context to both visitors and search engines. A well selected and placed image should be correctly Meta-tagged to reflect the page it’s posted on too. Many site owners who use images wisely are surprised to find out that the image search feature of the major search engines actually ends up providing up to 10% or more of the total traffic to the site—a nice bonus indeed.
Again, creating a search-friendly website is really based on common sense…things like making sure everything works as it should and building the site from the ground up instead of top-down. Here at WSpider, we’re all about this common sense approach. If you’d like to learn more about our web development philosophy, please contact us today!
