How to Develop Search Engine Friendly Website ?

The design of a website is one of the most important key success factors and it does not only affect the user experience, but also the search results.

If you truly want your website to reap the benefits of having an online presence, then SEO-friendly website design is a necessity. Search Engine Optimization is a method of improving the visibility of a website in search engines through organic search results.

Elements for SEO Friendliness

• Keywords
• Keyword Placement
• URL's SEO/User Friendly
• Website Navigation
• Optimized Images
• Site Speed
• Link Structures
• Create & Maintain an XML Sitemap
• Robots.txt
• 301 Redirects
• Social Media
• Responsive Website Design

Keywords

Keywords are an important part of any search engine optimization campaign. If you're using the wrong keywords, search engines and your target market may never find you. It's important when starting a website to first establish what the business objectives are. Do you want to target a local area, national or global? With this plan in place you can then build pages that target these specific keywords, or decide where these pages may go down the line once the foundation is built.

Keyword Placement
For a website to successfully integrate into Google you first must tell us what a particular page is about. It's important to get keywords on the right position on the page, but don't overdo it. Here are the best places:

• Title tag
• Meta description and keywords
• Website slogans
• Navigation
• Breadcrumb trails
• H1, H2 and H3 tags
• Bullet points
• Alt text
• Internal links
• Footer links
• URL's
• File / folder names

Utilize Heading Tags
When it comes to optimizing a page, it's vital that you include the chosen keyword/s in the header. After all, if that's what the page is about it makes sense to have a heading - right? If you've chosen an irrelevant keyword you'll suddenly find that the bounce rate will increase and the average time spent on a particular landing page will drop.

You should try and include the keyword in the H1, however if it's relevant and natural you can also include it in (or variations of a specific keyword) in H2's and H3's.

Website Navigation

The better your site structure, the better your chance of higher ranking in the search engines. Every website has some "structure." It might be a rigorous and streamlined structure, or it may be a disorganized jumble of pages. If you are intentional and careful with your site structure, you will create a site that achieves

SEO friendly URL's

URLs describe a site or page to visitors and search engines. Keeping them relevant, compelling, and accurate is the key to ranking well.

The URL of a web document should ideally be as descriptive and brief as possible. If, for example, a site's structure has several levels of files and navigation, the URL should reflect this with folders and subfolders. Individual pages' URLs should also be descriptive without being overly lengthy, so that a visitor who sees only the URL could have a good idea of what to expect on the page.

Here's an example of a bad URL structure:

www.example.com/gh/458594bdavdx/swsw

And here is an example of a good URL structure:

www.example.com/digital-marketing/seo-services

Images
You need to optimize your images to achieve faster loading times and subsequent search engine visibility.

• Try to keep your images' file size as small as possible
• It's best to place your images on context in the page. The more relevant the text around your image, the better results you'll get for rankings.
• Place your images inside a folder named "images" or something similar so the final URL of the image looks something like this: /images/image.jpg.

Site Speed
Site speed is very important and if your website is slow to load this could put perspective customers off. Site speed is must be above 85%.
A good way to check the speed of your website is here; PageSpeed Insights

Link Structures

• internal links are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. They are commonly used in main navigation.
  
• These type of links are useful for three reasons:
  
• They allow users to navigate a website.
• They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.
• They help spread link juice (ranking power) around websites.
• On an individual page, search engines need to see content in order to list pages in their massive keyword-based indices. They also need to have access to a crawlable link structure--a structure that lets spiders browse the pathways of a website--in order to find all of the pages on a website. Hundreds of thousands of sites make the critical mistake of hiding or burying their main link navigation in ways that search engines cannot access. This hinders their ability to get pages listed in the search engines' indices.

XML Sitemap
A XML sitemap is very important from a technical SEO perspective as it allows the search engines to see every page of your website and crawl it. It's one of the easiest ways for you to provide information about your website to the search engines, so it should definitely be on your list of priorities.

Robots.txt
A robots.txt file allows you to notify the search engines of any pages which you don't want them to crawl. This is perfect for the check-out area of a website, as you want to keep sensitive information private.

It works likes this: a robot wants to vists a Web site URL, say http://www.example.com/welcome.html. Before it does so, it firsts checks for http://www.example.com/robots.txt, and finds:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

301 Redirects

This is one of the most efficient and search engine friendly way to indicate that a page has been "permanently" moved and that new content has replaced it. All too often, people place a temporary 302 redirect which doesn't pass the authority of one page onto the page it is redirecting to. This is because it is a temporary redirect as opposed to a permanent redirect. Therefore, make sure you use the 301 redirect where necessary.

Responsive Website Design

Needless to say, and it can be seen in various reports related to the global mobile internet usage, the number of users accessing the internet using mobiles phones and tablets is more than that of desktop users. you must make your website accessible on mobiles and tablets. If your website is having a responsive website design, it can be easily accessed from any device. Moreover, Google gives better ranks to mobile-friendly/responsive websites. For this, you need not to develop and deploy separate dedicated websites for mobile devices and desktops. Develop a responsive template/theme and use it in your website, it will be automatically reshaped and resized according to the size of the screen.

Social Media

• Social Media should be part of your SEO strategy as building relationships and interacting with connections can help build your brand enormously. Not only that but it gives you exposure and helps build a trusted community and gain credibility.
• Link building is perhaps the number one reason to jump on board the Social Media bandwagon: the process of visitors sharing links within their own network can result in a large number of inbound links. In summary, social media can provide an organization with an affordable channel that accomplishes results.

Content

• Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines . To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline/title. Title should be in h1 tag
• Every page should contain the title and description tags with good keywords to describe the page content.
• Flash: Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and make people run away.
• Avoid using frames . Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.