As a digital marketing agency in the UK, we understand just how important it is to make your website SEO-friendly. SEO is what can define your company’s online presence. It can definitely make or break your visibility on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It’s important to make your website as SEO-friendly as possible in order to truly grow your business online.

It is simple enough, but it does require various tools and at least a little expertise. That’s why most businesses leave their digital marketing to agencies like Explosion Digital. We come equipped with all the tools you need, and years of online experience when it comes to SEO and other marketing strategies.

If you think you’re ready to try handling your website’s SEO yourself, we’ve put together this guide to teach you how you can design an SEO-friendly website. Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term commitment and isn’t something that’ll give you results overnight. You have to be dedicated and in it for the long haul to really see the results you’re looking for. So, read on to learn more about how you can use SEO as a tool to boost your business’s online standing.

First Off, What Is SEO?

If you’re unfamiliar with digital marketing “jargon”, we’ll make things a little easier for you to understand. Before getting into how to design an SEO-friendly website, let’s dive into what SEO actually is.

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. The easiest way to understand what SEO is is by breaking down its two main components:

• Search Engine: We’re sure you already know what a search engine is, but if you’re unfamiliar, that’s okay! A search engine, simply put, is a website like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. People (including you) go on these websites and search for words like “SEO services near me Amersham” or “how to boil an egg” to get millions of results in just a few seconds.
• Optimization: By definition, optimization means to more or less make something as perfect and effective as possible.

So, Search Engine Optimization is basically how you optimize your writing to be read by Google and other related websites. SEO is what helps your company stay on top of the rest of the results. This gives you a better advantage by making sure people see your website first. It is what prevents your website from being buried in the deep depths of Google’s 2nd results page. SEO is essentially what keeps your company relevant on Google.

How To Design An SEO-Friendly Website

Now that you’re up to speed on what SEO truly is, it’ll be much easier to understand how to design an SEO-friendly website. Here are our in-house tips:

1. Come Up With Unique Titles & Description For Every Page

   An SEO-friendly website will have unique meta descriptions and meta titles. Your page titles (and content titles) should ideally fit in the 50-60 character range. Your meta descriptions should go only up to 155 characters so Google can read (and display) them better. Not only should your titles and descriptions be unique, but they should also be relevant to what your business caters to. It should be eye-catching enough to reel in your target audience. Titles especially are crucial when it comes to search engine indexing, as they tell potential customers what the page is all about.

2. Keep Your URL Structure Clean
   

   Nobody likes messes, even in the online world. To avoid messy URLs, you should try to follow the best and most efficient practices for search engine indexing. When it comes to permanent links, make sure they’re all in lower case. They should also be separated by dashes so they can be read easier, as well as be descriptive enough to show your audience what you’re all about. Apart from this, a clean URL structure will try to incorporate keywords organically for increased visibility.

3. Keep The Speed As High As You Can
   

   When you enter a website that doesn’t load fast, you’re most likely to click away. Nobody likes slow webpages, and that’s a well-known fact. In order to make your website SEO-friendly, it’s important to do routine SEO audits that have thorough information on how you can improve the speed of your pages. Making use of image optimisation can help greatly when it comes to increasing your page loading speed. This will also give you an upper hand when it comes to ranking algorithms. Your website will stand above slower websites.

4. Create Unique Content
   

   Since SEO is a long-term game, it’s important to come up with unique content on a regular basis. Plagiarism is the biggest no-no when it comes to content, online or otherwise. When you plagiarise content, your website gets flagged by search engines and this reduces your visibility and overall SEO-friendliness.

5.  Optimise Your Images

   When you incorporate images into your website, it gives it a more professional and trustworthy look. However, images with large sizes can reduce your page’s loading speed. This is terrible for your website. You should always make sure to optimise your images, and even incorporate alt text so search engine crawlers can read the image and understand it better.

6. Keep And Eye On Your Content’s Structure
   

   Content structure is not only important to make things easy to understand and flow well, but it is also important for SERPs to read. Websites with proper content structures as easier to index. Here’s the general structure you should follow:

• • Header
  • H1 Tag/Page Title
  • Content, divided into Subheading (H1, H2, H3, etc. tags for better-structured content)
  • Author Information/Bio, Share Options
  • Footer

7. Be Responsive

   No matter what device is being used to access your website, it must always be responsive enough. SERPs have now started stressing the importance of compatibility. A website that is mobile-friendly has a higher chance of ranking well. So, you should try to make your website as responsive and compatible as you can to have a better standing on SERPs.

8. Make Use Of Internal Linking

   Internal linking is integral when it comes to search engine crawlers. It creates a kind of map for them, making it easy for them to associate relevant pages together. This creates a solid foundation and internal architecture to make your website super SEO-friendly.

Conclusion

We hope these tips helped you understand how to make your website SEO-friendly. Follow our blog for more digital marketing tips and tricks. If you think you need help with digital marketing, contact us today, We’ll give you a free consultation and tell you just how we can help you Explode into the Digital world!