8 checklists To Determine SEO Friendly Website
You might have heard the term “SEO friendly website” but what does this term really means and why you should focus on having one?
What exactly does a SEO friendly website mean?
A Search Engine Optimized website basically means website that makes search engine easy to rank your website for a particular keyword. It makes it easier for search engines to crawl by understanding its structure and content.
Having a website doesn’t necessarily mean that it will rank you on search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. Besides of you having a great content on your website, following are the few criteria you need to check for if you are looking to rank on search engines.
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Website Loading time
You must have heard many a times that website that loads fast can help you rank your website higher. But did you know that:
“1 second delay in website loading speed can reduce conversion by 7% - Hubspot”
A one-second delay in page load time yields:
- 11% fewer page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 7% loss in conversions
Even a second delay could be a huge loss a website owner can’t afford. So what should you do now?
First step would be to benchmark the current website speed of your website. You can check the page speed for the free tool named Pingdom.
- Go to https://tools.pingdom.com and enter in the website link in the URL text box.
- Select in the location to test from and click on Start Test button.
- You will get a detailed list of website speed improvement suggestion.
The average website load time should be minimum of 3 seconds, the lesser the better. If it’s taking longer than 3 second to load, you might want to do the following changes to your website:
- Minimizing HTTP request
- Enable Compression
- Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML
- Remove render-blocking JavaScript
- Leverage brochure caching
- Optimize images
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Mobile Friendly Design
Is my website Mobile-Friendly?
Checking whether you have a mobile friendly website or not is very easy. All you have to do is check the mobile friendliness of the website on one of the Google’s free tool “Webmaster tools”.
- Visit
Google’s Mobile Friendly test tool Enter in the URL of the web page and click on TEST URL button
- You’ll see a message whether the website is mobile-friendly or not. In case it is not then Google will even mention suggestion that could help you make you web page mobile friendly.
- Visit
Google’s Mobile Friendly test tool Enter in the URL of the web page and click on TEST URL button
Broken Links
You must be wondering what do we mean by broken link and what causes this link?
A broken link or dead link on a web page is a link that no longer exists. There are numerous reasons that can make your website prone to have a broken link. Few of them are:
- Link to external websites doesn’t work anymore.
- A link that points to an old page on a site that no longer exists on the server, usually caused by change in file name or structure.
- Misspellings in the link/URL.
- A webpage was moved without a redirect being added.
If you click a broken link, you’ll see a 404 page error or similar message displaying the webpage is not available.
Search engines crawlers see this factor as the website’s quality. These links within your website can affect your presence in the search engine. Because of which, it is very crucial to remove or update the broken links.
Clearing this broken link can add context to your website, improve user experience, and even make your content easily accessible for visitors and search engines. A website with too many broken links can be a signal to SERPs for low quality site.
- To check if you website contains any back links, all you need to do is visit the website
Broken Link Checker
and enter in the URL of the website and click on Find Broken Link button.
- After which you will be prompted to enter in the security code.
- Then click on Find Broken Link Now! button.
If your website is a wordpress site, all you need to do is install a plugin called Broken Link Checker and get the list of broken links present in your website.
This will show you all the broken link the website holds, all you need to do is get rid of this page by either removing or replacing them.
Duplicate / Keyword Stuffed content
Duplicate Content:
Like it sounds “duplicate content” refers to content that has been shared between different website or within different web pages of the same website.
Scraped content is one of the terms given to content which has been taken from other website and republished it as it is, or modifying it slightly before republishing it, without adding any original content or value.
We will probably never say this enough but duplicate content leads to SEO issue that can penalize your ranking. Make sure you check for duplicate content and even for near duplicate to keep your SEO top notch.
Keyword Stuffing:
You must have been told that mentioning keywords in your website help you get a top rank in search engines. But many people mistakenly think that if you just include keywords within your page’s content many numbers of times, you will automatically rank for it.
The truth being, Google definitely looks for keywords on your web page, but this keyword should add value outside of pure keyword usage. If a page is going to be give values to users, it won’t sound like it was written by a robot, so incorporate your keywords and phrases naturally in a way that is understandable for your readers.
Check the below mentioned example of keyword stuffing:
Keyword stuffing basically refers to manipulating a website’s ranking by loading a webpage multiple times with keywords. This is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technique, considering webspam or spamindexing, in which keywords are loaded into a web page’s meta tags, visible content, or backlink’s anchor text in an attempt to gain an unfair rank advantage in search engine.
This Black Hat SEO technique can lead to website been banned or penalized on major search engines either temporarily or permanently.
This technique of keyword stuffing has been used in the past to obtain top search engine rankings for particular keywords, but this is outdated and adds no value to ranking today.
XML sitemap
There are basically 2 types of sitemap, one is XML sitemap and other is HTML sitemap. A XML sitemap is used by search engines to index your site and HTML sitemap is for humans to get a briefing of the webpage linked to your website.
In this blog we will talk about XML sitemap.
A XML sitemap written in External Markup Language is a list of pages present in your website which helps search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing to index your site. Search Engines often use the sitemap as a guide to index your webpage, although it will be decided by SERP which page to index and which to skip.
The sitemap contains information which helps to speed up the indexing on search engines. It contains details like name of the page, created on, modified on and its relationship with other pages.
Sitemaps are one of those rare things that Google gives a big thumps up to, so always keep it updated.
- Creating a sitemap doesn’t require any technical help, all you can do is visit
https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and enter in your home website link and click on Start button.
- After which you will be prompted to a screen to Download the sitemap.
- Click on DOWNLOAD YOUR XML SITEMAP FILE button and upload the file to your website’s home directory.
- Creating a sitemap doesn’t require any technical help, all you can do is visit
https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and enter in your home website link and click on Start button.
Unique meta tag and title
Meta tags are invisible tags that provides data about your web page to SERP and website visitors. Basically, they make it easier for search engines to determine what the page is about.
They are placed in the
section of the HTML web page, so needs to be coded based on your CMS. They can be optimized to highlight the most important elements of your website and make it stand out in search engine results.There are various types of meta tags which fulfill different roles, but we will focusing on meta description which is the crucial factor to get clicks to your website.
Once your website is indexed in the search engine two main factors can determine the click through rate. One is title for web page and one is meta description. Both are important for organic search results and even for PPC (Google Adwords).
Title Tags: The title tag should be clear, descriptive and usually should not be more than 55 characters. Avoid having same title tag for cross domain and even for different pages within your website.
<title> DigitalDrop- Best Digital Marketing services in Goa, India.</title>
Meta Description: This tag provides a description to your webpage, and usually should contain no more than 160 characters. It should present in the
tag of the web page.It’s important to note that the meta description always won’t show up in the result for Google search (as Google usually picks up a snippet of text from the page itself) but it’s useful in other ways. Avoid duplicate content for meta description within different pages of the website.
<meta name=”description” content=””/>
Robots.txt file
Robots.txt is a text file which tells web robots (most often search engines) how to crawl pages on the website. It also tells web robots which pages not to crawl.
It is a part of Robot Exclusive Protocol (REP), a group of web standards that regulate how robots can crawl the web, index and serve the content to the users.
Basic Format:
User-agent: [user-agent name]
Disallow: [URL not to be crawled]
In case of a basic robots.txt without any limitations, the file would look like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Content up-to-date
As you all know Content is King not having a fresh content will affect your user experience and will in turn affect your search engine ranking.
Updating content is very crucial as you don’t want people to find information on the website that isn’t valid anymore.
Many small businesses feel developing a website is enough; however their website will become quickly outdated without attention. Keeping website updated will tell SERP that business is still alive and will rank them higher.
You can definitely contact a Website Maintenance company to maintain your website and keep it fresh without any hassle.
Hope this blog helped you know the importance of SEO friendly website. For any further question feel free to drop us a mail at info@digitaldrop.in, we would be more than happy to help you.
