3 Tips to Make your Website Search Engine Friendly

Search engine optimization (SEO) can seem complicated and mysterious for business owners, but there are some basic steps you can take to make your website friendly to both search engines and users. Here are some tips to improve your SEO.

Search engine crawlers cannot see your content

In the early days of the internet, text was the dominant media type. However, visually impaired or blind users cannot see the images and videos that form the basis of many web pages. By taking a few simple steps, you can ensure that visually impaired users such as Google will fully understand your content.

Images: These should feature alt tags that are concise and descriptive. 

Video: Captions should be used for video presentations without spoken words. It is also useful to provide captions or a text transcription for users who don't speak the language featured in the video. 

Audio: Audio files should include links to a text transcription.

Source: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/

Further to this, make sure the HTML used on your webpage is structured semantically so that headings are nested in a logical order, allowing users of assistive technology to jump from heading to heading within your webpage. This also means that Google can do the same.

Your website needs to be fast

In addition to its impact on customer retention, site speed is an important part of any website improvement program, as Google has included site speed as part of its quality score algorithm.

So what can you do to make your website faster?

Caching: If your site uses dynamic pages generated by languages such as PHP and ASP.net, then make sure you have a cache installed on your server. This will reduce the number of requests made to your server, which will make your site faster and cheaper to operate.

CDN: Using a CDN such as Amazon Cloudfront will mean that static files such as images load faster in different geographic locations. A CDN will also take the strain off your own web server, meaning that your server will have more memory to do important things like generating the HTML for your web pages.

Javascript: Ideally, Javascript files should be placed at the end of the HTML page content - before the closing body tag. This allows a page to load its content before any third-party data is transferred to the web browser. Further to this, any custom Javascript needs to be optimized for speed and efficiency.

Static file usage: Make sure that external resources such as scripts and stylesheets are loaded only when needed on the page being viewed.

Write contextually relevant content

Content is still king and should be written to suit your audience and the context of the subject at hand. When writing an article, consider who will be reading and where they are likely to come from. If you use PPC, then make sure the article contains keywords related to the advertising campaign, reducing the cost per click and providing a seamless flow between the advert and content.

Use contextually relevant links and call-to-actions such as links to other content or buttons to complete a form or checkout process. Remember to use words that feature in the content to provide signposts to users and maintain flow within the user journey of interacting with your website.

In conclusion, these tips offer a way for you to improve your search engine rankings easily while also providing a better user experience. If you need any help or advice, there are many resources available online or from SEO professionals.