SEO Friendly Website Design – 5 Simple Steps

Do your website is SEO friendly?

Let me clear you – SEO friendly website designing and SEO are completely different things.

You may be putting a lot of time, efforts and money to search engine optimize your website, but if your site is not SEO friendly then everything is in vain!

Can you build a great relationship with a person, who is not trustworthy at all? Of course not! Because the foundation (trust) itself is weak.

Likewise, there is no point of Search Engine Optimization, if the website itself is not SEO friendly.

SEO Friendly Website Designing

1. URL structure: A simple and human readable URL structure is most important from SEO point of view. It will be of great help for your on-page optimization, when the site will go live.

The advantage of a semantic URL is, it maintains the file hierarchies like -

Category –> Subcategory –> Title

Example: http://moneyctl.com/seo/8-link-building-strategies-for-SEO-success/

Can you see, how the category ‘ SEO ’ is complementing the title, in the above example? Your web-designer and programmer should workout this, before your site going live.

Good news! If you are using WordPress, the best open source CMS. There is an option in your dashboard to set your Permalink for better SEO.

2. Canonicalization: Nobody likes duplicate contents including Google. You have to choose one, between www and non-www version of your website. In the eyes of search engines, this is duplicate content.

You can choose any version to make your site SEO friendly. And, it requires a simple 301 redirection (Permanent redirection), which your developer can implement easily.

The canonical tag looks like -

<link rel=“canonical” href=“http://www.moneyctl.com/seo/5-great-tips” />

There is a nice plugin available for WordPress users – Canonical URL’s.

3. Search Engine indexable content: What is the point, if search engine can’t see your website content. And, if it can’t see, it can’t index also.

You must be aware that search engines are blind to images, flash files, java applets and videos etc. But, index html content very efficiently. Most of your website content should be html. And, all your image and video files should contain a descriptive alt tag to provide information about them to search engines.

I have seen lots of websites made up of complete flash. They struggle a lot to rank for their home page also. Because the flash elements completely block the search spiders for indexation.

Your aim should be – What you can see on your website, search engines also should be able to see the same thing. This is the foundation of designing an SEO friendly website.

4. XML Sitemap: Sitemap is a great way to inform search engines about your newly published content, for indexation. A sitemap ensures fast and complete indexation of all your contents.

To make your website SEO friendly an XML sitemap is indispensable. Download the WordPress plugin Google XML Sitemaps to generate sitemaps easily.

5. Website loading speed: Google ranks fast loading websites higher in SERPs. Delayed page loading is the only reason most of the web-surfers abandon a site. And, when it comes to mobile surfing, the incidence is even more. This results in higher bounce rate and demotion in SERPs.

You can adopt methods like – Use of valid XHTML codes on your site, less use of images and videos or more use of html contents for faster loading of web pages.

A simple solution to increase website speed is use of CDN (content delivery network). Checkout these 5 Best CDN WordPress Plugins to make your site blazing fast.

Do you use any more techniques to make your website SEO friendly?