68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. (BrightEdge)

With more businesses getting online, it is important to make your website SEO-friendly and rank high on search engine results. Integrating SEO into your website will boost your rankings, especially on SERPs, and drive more traffic to your page. Once indexed, your web pages can serve the most relevant and valuable web-pages to users based on the niche topics they search for. With billions of people using search engines every day, only a meager 0.78% of Googlers click on results from the 2nd page. Therefore, it is important to develop an SEO-friendly website and build organic traffic to earn first-page rankings on Google.

In the world of digital marketing, SEO techniques can be broadly divided into two categories: White hat and Black hat techniques. White hat techniques are accepted by search engines and are recommended ways of improving rankings, whereas black hat techniques are unlawful activities that can get your website blacklisted by search engines and also result in penalties. Some black hat techniques that should be avoided at all costs include keyword stuffing, buying links, keyword spamming, hidden content and links, cloaking, etc. SEO when done for your website in the right way, can fetch higher dividends and adds immense value to the website.

Some top tricks of the trade for operating an SEO-friendly website include:

  • Use responsive web design

Having a responsive design is one of the most vital components of driving success for your business. Responsive design allows you to cater to audiences logging in from different devices, be it a tablet, mobile, or desktop. As each device has a different-sized screen, your website content must adapt to all the changing screen sizes. If your website does not have a responsive design in current times, your users will struggle to read the content, view images, or click on links. A negative user experience will mean losing out on potential customers to competitor websites. With a responsive web design, your website becomes more user-friendly, audiences will stay longer on your site, resulting in improved rankings in search page results. 

  • Avoid duplicate content

When it comes to improving your SEO, avoid duplicate content like plague. It is a black hat technique and warrants penalties and strict actions. This will seriously destroy your credibility and damage your search engine rankings. To keep your SEO top-notch, always check for duplicate content. When content available on a site is available on multiple URLs, it should be canonicalized for search engines. The most common way to do so is to set up 301 redirects from the “duplicate” page to the original content page. As an extra safeguard, it’s wise to add a self-referential rel=canonical link to your existing pages to avoid content scrapping.

  • Create XML sitemaps

In simple terms, a sitemap is a list of website URLs. XML stands for “Extensible Markup Language” and is a way of displaying information on websites. The sitemap helps search engines to understand your website’s structure when they are crawling it. Once you do this, the likelihood of your website having an improved ranking increases. Sitemaps inform the search engines when a page was updated, its frequency, and how to find and index content within the website’s structure. If you are not using a sitemap, your website could be seen as using duplicate content, which can be disastrous for your SEO. Having a sitemap has enormous benefits and it takes only minutes to develop. 

  • Create content to target valuable keywords

When you create meaningful and ‘relevant’ content on your website, you give valuable information to your audience. Having relevant keywords in your content establishes your site as an authority on the subject and drives interested traffic to your website. To find the relevant keyword, conduct a “keyword research” and find the vital phrases for your content and SEO and the value against each. Having suitable keywords that match the phrases searched by your audience triggers your website to appear in relevant search results. Focus on “long-tail keywords” that drive better traffic for your content. Once your keyword research is done, decide the content you want to develop- blogs, infographics, white papers, etc. Presenting your keyword in the right content format is very important to reach the target audience. This will also help your page appear in the right search results, thereby improving the overall performance of your site.

  • Use robots.txt

Robots.txt file can be used to prevent search engines from crawling specific parts of your website and essentially contains directives for search engines. If you can find the source code of your website that you can use and it doesn’t even require much technical knowledge to leverage the power of robots.txt file. It is actually a text file that tells web robots or search engines which specific pages to crawl and not crawl on your website. When a search engine is about to visit a relevant target page of a site, it will check robots.txt for instructions. If your website has a lot of pages, it will take longer for search engine bots to crawl them, thereby negatively affecting your website performance. By using robots.txt, you are essentially telling search engines to avoid certain pages. 

  • Use internal linking

Internal linking makes your website SEO-friendly and helps search engines to discover new pages on your website and index them. It allows your readers to navigate easily within your website and helps build page authority. Once your audience has enough relevant reading information on your website, they will be tempted to stay on your page for a longer duration. Add internal links to help search engines discover and index pages on your website. Both your users and search engines use internal links to find relevant content on your website. It’s also important to use descriptive keywords or phrases in the anchor text of your internal texts. 

Google SEO web-design strategies have essentially two parts: On-page optimization and Off-page optimization.

Some of the on-page optimization strategies include:

  • Conduct keyword research, and use them strategically in your content.
  • Publish high-quality content
  • Use title tags, header tags, alt image tags, and meta tags correctly
  • Use multiple content formats like blogs, articles, PRs, etc
  • Optimize every URL
  • Improve page loading speed

A few off-page optimization processes include:

  • Influencer marketing
  • Guest posts by niche bloggers
  • Brand mentions on third-party websites
  • Social media outreach
  • Content marketing
  • Celebrity endorsements

When SEO is done correctly, it can add immense value to your brand and bring in greater dividends. It brings in quality traffic, delivers a better user experience, and helps organizations to achieve their marketing goals. If your ultimate goal is to create more online traffic for your business, then you must invest in an SEO-friendly website. SEO techniques generally take time to show results and do not result in overnight success, but the entire process is truly worth it. 

At Citytech, we have experience of over two decades in creating digital marketing strategies for countless businesses across the globe. Our extensive research and top-class strategies can definitely help your business conquer the online world and beat your competitors. To know more about our digital marketing capabilities and how we can help you leverage these strategies for your business, visit us at https://www.citytechcorp.com/company/contact-us/