A well-designed, unique website is crucial for businesses that want to be successful online. A properly built website not only provides for a better user experience when navigating your website, in can also improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website. By utilizing on-site SEO best practices when building your website, you can increase the organic traffic your website gets which can lead to more clients. In order to do this, we’re going to explore 6 helpful tips on how to optimize your website for SEO.
How To Optimize Your Website For SEO (6 Tips)
1. Use a Clean and Simple Design
Not only does having a clean and simple design provide a positive user experience on your website, it can also help improve your SEO in several ways. Firstly, making your website easy to access and navigate, will help search engines like Google properly crawl and index your site. Getting your website pages crawled and indexed can lead to higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Another important factor in why it is smart use a clean and simple design is that it allows your website to load faster. Google and other search engines don’t want to send users to slow websites. This is because the longer a website takes to load, the more likely a user is to click off the website. Therefore, search engines consider page speed as an important ranking factor. So by ensuring you have a fast-loading website, you can improve your SEO.
2. Utilize Keywords in Content
In order to rank well for certain keywords and search phrases on search engines, you need to make sure that you are utilizing these keywords throughout he content of your pages. Google will rank pages higher that are most relevant to the keyword search of the user. By using these keywords and similar phrases throughout your pages, you are signalling to search engines that your page is extremely relevant.
That being said, you don’t just want to spam the keyword over and over again throughout the whole page. You need to make sure your website content contains real substance and value, while also ensuring that the keywords are properly reflected in the topics discussed. This includes properly utilizing the keywords in different headings (including H1 & H2 headings) as well as in paragraphs. See here for more insight on the importance of keywords in urls and page titles.
3. Use Keyword-Rich URLs and Page Titles
On top of using keywords throughout your website content, you will also want to include these keywords in your website’s URLs and page titles in order to effectively boost your website’s SEO. This can assist search engines in properly understanding what your pages are about, which can improve your rankings in SERPs by linking it to relevant search topics.
When creating URLs, it’s imperative to use keywords that accurately reflect the content of the page. For example, if this page’s topic is about “How to Optimize your Website for SEO”, a good URL could be “example.com/optimize-website-seo”.
You can further boost your website’s SEO by also utilizing keyword-rich page titles. A page title is what will show on the search engine results before clicking on the page. By using a keyword-rich page title, you are sending another signal to search enginges on what your page is about and can increase your SERP ranking.
4. Optimize your Website for Mobile
Another important aspect to take into account when building your website is to optimize it for mobile devices. With the majority of users in today’s world accessing the internet and websites through their mobile devices, it is now more important than ever to ensure your website is mobile-friendly.
Google has made it part of their guidelines that mobile responsiveness is an important ranking factor for SEO. This means that by not optimizing your website for mobile devices, you risk lowering your SEO score and damaging your search engine rankings.
By utilizing a responsive design on your website, you ensure that your website automatically adjusts itself to the screen size of the device it’s being viewed on. This will not only improve the user experience of your website visitors, but improve your website’s SEO as well.
5. Use Alt text for Images
One aspect of optimizing your website for SEO that may get overlooked is the use of alt text for images. Alt text, also known as alt tags or alt descriptions, are used to describe an image on a website
There a number of SEO benefits of using alt text on your website. Firstly, it helps to convey to search engines what your images are about, and using relevant images can help improve the SEO ranking of your page.
Alt text also vastly improves the accessibility of your website. This is because alt text provides a text alternative for users. It will describe images to users who are visually impaired.
6. Use Internal Linking
Finally, utilizing internal linking throughout the pages of your website can improve SEO. Internal linking involves linking to other page on your own website within your website content. By using internal linking on your website, you can help search engines crawl and index your website more effectively which can improve your ranking.
Additionally, by having a lot of links to a specific page on your website, you are signalling to search engines that this page is of significant importance which can in turn improve its ranking on SERPs.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Today!
While there are many factors that lead to a website’s SEO ranking, how you design and build out your website ultimately plays a crucial role on how your website ranks on search engines. You can get as many citations and backlinks as you’d like, but if your website isn’t built to be optimized for SEO, it will not rank to its full potential.
By implementing these on-site SEO best practices, you can increase the organic traffic your website gets and ultimately get more leads for your business. Mendel Sites specializes in building websites that are optimized for on-site SEO. We can also provide a free website audit that goes over how your current website performs for SEO (and other factors) and what improvements can be made.