There are numerous reasons why SEO is so important, but arguably the main issue is that SEO generates highly relevant traffic for purchases – with conversion rates of up to 14.6%, according to experts.
Based on these numbers, it’s no surprise that optimizing your site for search engines should be a high priority.
SEO has become one of the main strategies when it comes to professional website creationbeing the “darling” of entrepreneurs and marketing professionals.
By investing in SEO, companies are able to expand their reach among relevant audiences and be found at the most critical stage of the customer journey – the purchase.
Additionally, combined with content marketing and blogging, SEO also allows you to build and grow your brand by creating top-of-funnel content for users who are still in the early stages of the buying cycle.
The benefits are clear. But how do you actually get there? Read on and check out some essential tips for creating an optimized website!
What this article covers:
Tips for creating an optimized website
Creating an optimized website involves several issues. However, here is a list of some that you need to pay close attention to.
1. Start by creating a top-down SEO plan
The first thing you should do, whether creating an SEO-friendly website from scratch or redesigning your existing website, is to create a plan. SEO can and should be strategic, and by creating a plan, you eliminate the guesswork, which only gets worse over time.
The less you plan your site, the more trouble you will be inviting later. And this applies to both the strategic and tactical aspects of your website.
So it’s especially important for launching a new website, it’s critical that you create a top-down plan for how to approach SEO. Top-down planning lets you “reverse engineer” the perfect scenario and figure out how to get there.
2. Create an SEO-friendly website architecture
One of the most important things to consider to make your website more SEO friendly is your website architecture. The hierarchy in which your pages are structured directly impacts how search engines understand them.
This is especially true for e-commerce sites and sites with many pages.
Of course, on any website, some pages are more important than others. So Google wants to see them organized in an “intuitive” way so that both machines and users can understand.
As a result, and going back to the first point here, you want to create a visual layout that directly maps to your site before you start designing or redesigning it.
3. Use a mobile-friendly responsive design
Once you’ve defined your SEO-friendly site structure, it’s time to consider one of the most important aspects of modern SEO: mobile-friendliness.
It’s no secret that Google’s algorithm prioritizes websites that are well optimized for mobile devices. In the end, data traffic jumped to 20% in 2022 due to the use of 5G – and this trend will continue to grow.
As Google knows this, their algorithms are optimized to provide a great user experience not only for everyone sitting at their computers, but also for those searching on mobile devices.
Consequently, Google has also updated its own crawlers – and now most highly ranked websites are crawled with their “Googlebot smartphone” mobile crawler.
You can see if Google uses this crawler for your site in Google Search Console. However, even if you see “Googlebot Desktop”, remember that eventually all websites migrate to mobile crawlers – and as such, your website should be ready for the move.
Continuing with the previous point, when considering the layout of your site – including its mobile version – you need to take a strategic look at your navigation menu.
It’s no surprise that SEO-friendly websites have great navigation. In recent years, the trend in website optimization has clearly established itself as the most useful experience for the end user. In other words, SEO and UX are merging at an ever-increasing rate.
As such, when designing your SEO-friendly website, your goal should be to make it as useful and easy to navigate as possible. A great way to do this is to structure your navigation menu so that it promotes the pages you want your potential customers to see.
For example, if you’re a service business, your main menu should feature pages with the individual services you provide.
If you offer products, you can take a similar approach by presenting your product categories. For bloggers, these pages are the blog topic categories.
This also invites Google to crawl and index more pages. After all, these are the most valuable pages on your site. By adding internal links from the navigation menu, you ensure that Google recognizes this as well.
Last thoughts
Definitely SEO is an extremely important strategy when it comes to website creation. For this reason, it is very important to develop a website that is optimized for both search engines and page visitors.
You also have the possibility to buy backlinks from specialized companies that also help with SEO.
In this article, we have mentioned just a few of the top tips for creating optimized websites. So, dedicate yourself to learning as much as possible about the subject and create a 100% optimized website!
