How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website

Many webmasters complain about their website not ranking well in the SERPs. What they fail to realize is that their website is not search engine friendly. An SEO friendly website contains more than keyword filled Meta tags and content.

A website must be created and designed keeping the visitors in mind. Search engines can get your website in the top ranking; but a well crafted website ensures that the visitor gets converted into a customer. You need to ensure that your website is both search engine and visitor friendly.

Tips for Creating a Search Engine Friendly Website:

1. Fill the Meta tags: Search engines come across the Meta tags well before the content. A major part of the search result is picked up from the Meta tags. The title tag helps the search engines and visitors in understanding what the webpage is about. The Meta description gets listed as the snippet in the search result. Well formatted Meta tags play a major role in making the website SEO friendly.

2. Include Breadcrumbs in the website: Breadcrumbs are navigational links present in the inner pages of the website. They link a web page to its respective category and sub category. Breadcrumbs help in the even distribution of the page rank to the connected web pages. You must include keywords as the anchor text of the breadcrumbs. Remember to place the breadcrumbs before the main heading of the web page.

3. Perform the On Page Optimization Activities: SEO of a website mainly consists of on page optimization activities. Implement these tips:

a. Add a heading tag to the web page.

b. As search engines cannot read images, add an alt tag to the images.

c. Name the image according to the selected keywords. Use hyphens to separate long keywords.

d. Place a keyword as the anchor text of a link.

e. Optimize the content of your web page. Make sure that the keyword density doesn’t exceed 2%.

4. Interlink all the important web pages: Interlinking web pages helps the search spiders to navigate the website. Web pages can be linked based on their category. E.g. an online book store can link their web pages based on the authors. It has been observed that a well linked website will always rank better than the non-linked websites. You can link to the important pages of your website from the homepage by using appropriate anchor text.

5. Use SEO Friendly URL Structure: Search engines do not understand the URL’s which contain the PHP / ASP code in them. A SEO friendly URL structure contains words separated by hyphens. You can rewrite your URL’s manually via the.htaccess file. WordPress gives you an option to change your URL structure with one click.

6. Generate XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps help the engines discover all the pages in your website. There are a lot of free XML sitemap generator tools available online. You can include the “priority” and “change frequency” tags in your sitemap. The priority tag indicates the importance of the web page to the search engines. The Change frequency tag tells the search engines how frequently the page is likely to change.

A fully optimized site increases your chances of ranking well in the SERPs. Once in the top SERPs, your website has a good chance of converting its visitors into customers.