SEO friendly website designing requires a lot of technical competencies. You would find millions of websites present over the internet but not all produce useful results. According to a recent study, every minute 380 websites are created and the rate keeps on increasing every time. Businesses and individuals around the world have now understood that having a website for a business or self-promotion is crucial in this culminating age of digitalization. What brings you here is also a quest for a good website. You are reading this post because you might be also trying to figure out what all it takes for a productive website.
A website is something that gives an online presentation of your product, services, or ideas that you put forward in front of the world wanting them to buy from you. In this tough time of cut-throat competition, you need a website that should be easily navigable, user-friendly, and moreover attractive.
The important aspect you need to consider before owning a website is the ‘WHY’ factor. Question yourself, first- why you need a website, and second why people should visit your website. People should visit your website because you are providing a solution to some problem. Ohh.. that’s not a big deal, there are millions out there providing the same solution. No, I am providing something unique. There you go, Kudos! But you still need to work hard in order to get people to your website.
Doesn’t matter you’re offering something unique or similar products in the market. Just like a mother feeds her baby, a website also demands every essential to grow, prosper and yield a sound result. The first requisite of getting a high-quality website is to find a reliable website development company or an experienced web developer offering profound services.
The Biggest Mistake Most People Make
Website designing is not a big deal. But a website is of no use until it is not optimized. The biggest mistake most people make is that they get their website designed by some other company and later consult another SEO company for website optimization. Things do not go hand in hand when you hire two different entities for a single goal. Therefore, you must hire a prominent Digital Marketing Company and ask them for both the services- website development and site optimization.
Key elements for an SEO friendly website
Quality Content
You might have heard people saying ‘Content is the King’. As a matter of fact, ‘Quality content is the king’. For a website to run successfully, it’s pivotal to fill in with quality website content. Writing irrelevant, distracting, boring content won’t yield a better result. The content you’re feeding into it should be informative, original, and plagiarism free. Search engine bots prefer high quality, and purposeful content for rankings.
Content Length
Not only the quality, but the length of the content also matters a lot in determining the quality of a website. According to the Google algorithm, a web page must consist content of a minimum of 200 to a maximum of 1000 words. Stay focused while writing content. It should be readable, grammatically correct and purposeful.
Readability
Higher is the text readability, greater is the retention rate. If your website contains content that is easily readable, eye-pleasing, it will hold visitors for long, giving them a way to go through every corner of the website. Avoid using difficult vocabulary, clutter, long sentences, stop words, etc. Be specific, clear and use shorter sentences and active web forms to address the readers.
Media
Media plays a vital role in making an SEO friendly website. No one likes to go through the content containing plain text without a visual and sound effect. Web pages with images make better customer engagement and boost website ranking. Therefore, add media like photos, videos in every piece of content you publish. Many of you might question that including video makes website heavy. And it’s true to that fact. But you do not need to put videos on web pages, you can give a link which when clicked will open on YouTube.
Social Media
Social media marketing is today’s most culminating way of promoting businesses to billions of users across the world. First, try to build a strong social media presence on every surging platform like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram. Then add every social media icon in a well-organized way that’s clearly visible to the visitors enabling them to share it seamlessly.
Navigation
Always try to make your website easily navigable. Easy navigation allows visitors to know where they are and how they could easily transverse from one page to another by clicking on the menu. Include categories in the menu properly and make them clickable. Also, ensure every clickable image has alt text and your search features work seamlessly. You can also use a sitemap in order to improve website navigation.
Web-Friendly
In order to make your website run smoothly over the internet, it must share a strong camaraderie with the web which means it must be web-friendly. With the users in the world with a diverse browser, make sure that your website runs perfectly on every browser. Consult with your web developerand make sure he knows the keys to utilizing Meta tags, alt tags, and other features to make it web-friendly.
Turnaround Time
A lot of people come up complaining with a long loading time taken by their website. The longer your website takes to load or run, the lesser is the user experience and higher is the website bounce rate. The minimum loading time should lie between 2 sec to 5 sec as people can wait for this long but if it takes longer than this, chances are more that they will leave your site after spending a short span on your website.
Interactive
In order to turn your website into a money-making device, it’s significant to bring it to life. The logo, graphics, designs, text, features should contribute altogether in making interactive website. It will not only engage visitors but also give them a better user experience. Let your website talk to your customers and solve queries and increase conversion rates. This optimum level can be achieved by making it more interactive.
Formatting
The way you place text, content, images, icons, buttons, etc play a major role in engaging customers. A poor format often confuses visitors about your context. Visitors are less likely to read a post with poor formatting. While writing down the content, use H1, H2, H3, etc tags, to break down the content. Also use bullets, italics, bolds, etc to highlight important points.
Use Correct Grammar and Spelling
Most of us think that ranking doesn’t have to do anything with the grammar and spelling. But as a matter of fact, it counts. Poor grammar or vocabulary errors give a bad impression of your business to the customers. Visitors are more likely to consider your website irrelevant and leave it without visiting every page. Besides, the Search Engines may also penalize you for this. Why would it show a page with a grammatical error higher on SERP than the other pages with error-free content?
Use of External and Internal Links
Proper internal and external linking also adds to the key element for a good website. Try to add links on certain keywords in your content to directly transverse visitors to another web page. This is marked as a good strategy as it helps Google to easily pass the link juice from different pages. The same applies to the external linking. Add links of some of the external sources on a certain keyword in the content. But never link to unrelated pages as it may get penalized by Google. Therefore, link to the sources that are related to your content or your reference.
Enable Easy Contact
After going through the entire corner of your website and finding it relevant the next step a visitor search for is ‘Contact’. Having everything outstanding and a low-grade contact page can ruin your entire effort. An easily accessible contact page is a prerequisite for a better conversion rate. The contact page must contain your mobile number, physical address, email address, links to social pages like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Unavailability of these things will create doubt in the visitor’s mind and they will be more likely to leave your site.
Add Testimonials and Reviews
Another thing you can do to make your website good and trustworthy is adding reviews and testimonials of clients, customers, and even employees. Displaying reviews and testimonials on your website helps build trust. Try to add some good comments and ask your clients to post their experience with your service. But make sure, where a positive review builds a stronger trust amongst visitors, a negative review can have just the opposite impact.
Conclusion
In nutshell, a website is like your home and the visitors are like the guest coming to your home. How do you treat a guest visiting your home? You make them feel special and comfortable so that they visit again? Make sure you do the same thing when you have guest visiting your website. An SEO friendly website lets your visitor have better experiences increasing the customer retention rate. At Banyanbrain, being a leading Website Development company, we help you in making extremely optimized websites. Our expert pool of professionals includes creative designers and skilled developers that can turn your ideas into reality.