Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Today, website creation goes hand in hand with SEO. After all, search engines prefer quality websites that meet the expectations and requirements of Internet users: integrating best practices and SEO optimizations into your site will ensure a better ranking on search engines. Your site’s content is important, but so is the way your information is accessed. Follow our advice and you can create an SEO-friendly website that will make a difference!
Table of content
Good architecture is the foundation of good SEO
When building a house, architecture is extremely important. The same goes for website design: it all starts with a solid foundation. This structure will show search engines which pages of your site are the most important. You are therefore responsible for highlighting certain items so users and robots can understand them. A good structure will help search engines understand where your most important content is located.
Building your website’s tree structure: the various steps
In order to create a meaningful tree structure and subsequently quality content, you first need to list the main services you want to offer to your audience.
Analyze your competitors' tree structure and compare it with your list
This will help you notice if you are missing ideas or sections that are important in your industry. Warning: do not copy exactly what your competitors are doing. If some services are highlighted on their website and you don't offer them, you shouldn't add them to your tree structure.
Organize your sections
Once your ideas have been defined, group them into coherent groups and subgroups, which can be easily understood by the user with the most coherent logic possible. For example, if you create a retail site that specializes in ready-to-wear apparel, you can organize your site into different categories such as gender, age or type of clothing. Keep it simple but above all logical. Clearly identifiable sections with quality content should be provided.
Define your navigation
Sort and simplify the organization of the groups you have created, link between pages that will make it easier to access your content and make the interface as intuitive as possible. Don't hesitate to take a step back and ask outsiders for their opinions. These people will probably be more objective and will surely find it easier than you to experience the platform as a potential visitor.
Use the structure you have created beforehand to showcase your content. Remember to prioritize and organize the content by theme.
For example: do you want to showcase your expertise? Create a space dedicated to your most recent blog posts. If you want to offer heels and sports shoes for women, they should be located in the "Women" section under the "Shoes" sub-section.
Internal linking is essential for SEO
Internal linking is a major asset when making your site SEO-friendly. It involves inserting links on your pages that redirect the user to different pages within your site. Internal linking will improve your site's SEO very effectively if done right. You can optimize it as soon as your site structure and URLs are defined. This will simplify user navigation. Internet users will tend to stay longer on your site and browse through all its content when clicking links to other pages.
Tailor your SEO for web crawlers
Also be aware that search engines use web crawlers and indexing robots to analyze and browse websites. All pages and links are therefore combed and search engines also examine the structure of your internal links. With these links, the robots will be able to identify the structure of your page by inferring the level of importance of its content. We recommend ensuring that each page is no more than 3 clicks away from the others. In other words, you should be able to find any page on the site by clicking on a maximum of three links.
Anchor text and internal linking
When you do internal linking, the anchor texts (this is the hyperlink you click on) are like an ad that you send to search engines. The search engines use the link text to assess the relevance and analyze the theme of your content. It is your responsibility to choose these links strategically and advantageously because they are useful not only for your search engine ranking but also for your audience, who will get a better idea of the content they visit. Don't hesitate to diversify your anchor text by using synonyms or a coherent terminology based on the keyword you want to highlight. In short: the anchor text must encourage clicks and contain words that describe the landing page.
The importance of keywords for an SEO-friendly website
More than 95% of Internet users do not go beyond the second page of search engine results and the vast majority of clicks are made on the first three results after entering a search. We recommend doing a significant amount of keyword research since if you do not use them in a way that benefits your SEO strategy, you risk compromising your online visibility. Using keywords will therefore help Google assign you the right position in search results. They will also be useful when defining your content strategy.
How to integrate keywords
Always keep your audience in mind when choosing and integrating keywords. Find words and sentences that describe what your content is about in a simple and clear manner. Try to think about the terms your audience would look for to find your content. You can spend some time on Google and see what related terms are most searched for online if you want inspiration.
Make sure that each page is optimized for a single keyword or a set of thematic keywords. This will make it easier for Google to understand the topic of each page and which page should be placed first on the term of your choice. If you choose to optimize different pages on the same keywords, it will be more difficult for Google to determine which page is the most suitable.
Once the keywords are determined, you will need to use them strategically by including them in titles, meta descriptions and URLs. Not sure why? Here are the different reasons:
The title reflects the main theme of your page. It will appear first when a search result is displayed and will help Google and Internet users sort and search for information.
The meta description will be found just under your title in the search results. It allows Internet users to better understand what the page is about and is intended to encourage them to visit your page rather than your competitors.
The URL is the address of the page. It provides access to the content. Google recommends having a clear but relatively short URL. There is no need to put words such as: "from", "the", "in" etc.
Responsive Web Design
All the above criteria to be taken into account for your website design allows for both a good ranking of your site by search engines and a good user experience, two essential elements.
To ensure that your site is well ranked on search engines, it is also important to work on the responsive end of your platform. This involves optimizing the reading and navigation experience based on the device being used and adapting your site to different screen sizes. This is all the more important because in 2018, Google deployed several updates that prioritize the mobile version of sites when ranking them. This means that Google's robots will first explore the mobile version of a page to determine the quality of the page and its content, hence the interest of having a page with a mobile version that is adapted to different formats.
If you still have doubts, you should know that 60% of searches are carried out on mobile phones, so you should adapt your design to meet this standard. There are three ways to adapt to different displays.
- Dedicated website
- Native application
- Responsive version
You decide which option is best for you. Generally, making a mobile site or a native application will be much more expensive. If your site is not at all suitable for mobile screens and tablets, consider the responsive option first, which will cost you less and should be faster to develop.
There are many things to consider when creating an SEO-friendly website. Don't hesitate to read our related articles if you want more information.
The success of your business depends on a well-defined SEO content strategy. My Little Big Web has extensive expertise in SEO content writing. If you want to maximize your online presence, contact us.
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