The situation, today, is completely different. In the contemporary competitive landscape, a site owner prioritizes a high rank on the search engine right from the time of building the website. Therefore, having a strong SEO foundation on a website is crucial.
How to Create a Solid SEO Foundation for Your Website
Prioritize Mobile
Google has changed their prioritization from mobile-friendly website indexing to mobile-first indexing. With mobile devices generating almost 60% of website traffic (source: Statista), this only makes sense.What does it mean from the SEO perspective? This implies that mobile versions of websites will be indexed before the desktop versions. Naturally, responsive website development is the best way to go.
Here are a few principles for building a mobile-first website:
- Use a responsive framework
- Design a thumb-friendly website since 75% of people use their thumb to operate mobile devices (source: UX Matters)
- Place the CTA in easily visible and accessible places and make the button large so that the users can tap
- Navigation must be clean and intuitive
- Constantly test the site
Not sure how to execute all these? Consider engaging a professional website design company and get your job done.
Enhance Loading Speed
Google has rolled out speed update as a crucial part of the ranking algorithm. Take care of this while building your website so as to increase its SEO-friendliness.
With so many websites for a specific product/service/information available on the web, the users are not going to wait for a long time for a page to load. They will simply bounce and visit a different site. If you don’t want your site to have an increased bounce rate and a low rank on the search engines, pay attention to increasing website speed.
Here are a few strategies to increase your site loading speed:
- Use a browser cache
- Compress images without affecting the quality
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce latency
- Leverage lazy loading
- Minimize HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript
Optimized Content
What’s SEO without content! Write SEO-friendly keyword-optimized content for your webpage. Make sure that the keywords match your users’ intent and search terms.
From meta titles and descriptions to on-page content, the website should follow SEO best practices. Also, your site URL must be properly optimized. Google states that the first 3 to 5 words in your URL are the most crucial. You can place your target keyword there. Also, keep it short and remove excess symbols and letters.
Further, make sure to include a blog section on your website and fill it with useful content optimized with relevant keywords. This is a long-term plan and you need to have a content calendar ready at your disposal.
Linking Structure
Linking structure plays a significant role both for website navigation and SEO.
Internal linking will help the site visitors check out multiple web pages on your site. However, make sure not to exhaust them from one page to another without any purpose. Every page must have dedicated CTAs at proper places so that people can easily convert.
Further, internal linking will help search engine bots to crawl the site and comprehend how each page is connected to each other. Finally, it will help to flow link juice and help to uplift the rank of each web page.
Outbound links are also crucial as they help the search engines to recognize your website’s nature and its authority in the niche.
Set Up Google Analytics
From the day you launch your website, make it a practice to monitor its performance. It will help you to improve the site features/functionality and properly direct your SEO strategy.
We recommend you set up Google Analytics. It will help you get insights into who is viewing your page, from which platforms are they coming, how many of the visitors are converting, at which point on your site most visitors are bouncing, and so on.
You will also get to know who is linking to your website and which content is linked the most. You can easily access keyword information like CTR (Click-Through Rate) and total keyword impression. Backed with all the data, your SEO foundation will be stronger.
Wrapping Up
These steps will help you to keep one step ahead of your competitors right from the time of developing a website. If your website is SEO-friendly, you need not give it a complete facelift later when you engage in SEO services. We hope you have found the blog useful. Let us know your thoughts.
