Search engine traffic can provide a huge boost for your business. While there are ways to pay for traffic (Google AdWords, for example), ensuring that your website gets enough organic search traffic will provide you with longer term benefits and greater ROI. While you may not be ready to go into a full-swing search engine optimization (SEO) or content marketing campaign yet, you can still lay a solid foundation when you build your website. Here we are going to go through some of the SEO basics for every website.

Be Indexable

This might seem like an obvious point to make, but some websites are still being developed in Flash or using other codes that impede Google’s ability to index your website. You won’t do very well in the search engines if you make it hard for Google to crawl and index your website.

This goes for the navigational elements on your website as well. The pages in the main navigation are typically your most important pages and you want to make sure that Google can find them easily. Your best best here would be to use CSS, and eschew Flash or image navigation bars.

Human-Readable URLs

Human-readable URLs provide a clear indication of the content within a page for both search engines and your human visitors.

  • example.com/cloudrock-seo-services
  • example.com/?p=12356

Meta Title Tags

As most of us know, Google’s Panda penalty came along and completely changed the SEO landscape a few years ago. One of the factors it looks out for is duplicate content. A common problem that we see is the use of the same title tag for every page on a website. This might indicate to Google that your pages are of low quality, especially if you don’t have that much content on each page.

Try to make your title tag unique, with the targeted keyword within (without stuffing) and descriptive of the content. If you want to add your brand name to the title tags, try to place it at the end as well.

Meta Description

Just to be clear, your meta description tag does not have any impact on your rankings. Neither Google, Bing, Yahoo or even Baidu uses it as a ranking factor. If they did, you would find many websites stuffing keywords into it. However, a clear, concise and persuasive meta description tag will increase your click-through-rates (CTR). Limit your description to around 150 to 160 characters and ensure that you do not have duplicate descriptions for different pages of your website.

Alt Text

Despite major leaps in image recognition, the major search engines still have a hard time deciphering exactly what is being shown in images. The Alt Text is a HTML tag that provides a short description of the image. It passes anchor text and helps search engines makes sense of the image. This is definitely a must if your website contains many images.

Install Google Analytics

It still surprises me how many business owners do not request their developers to install Google Analytics on their website. The purpose of most websites is to drive sales to their business. You want to know how much traffic you have, what they do on their website, and how many of those visitors turn to leads.

As the old adage goes, you can only manage what you measure. Online marketing is one of the most data-rich marketing activities out there, and that is something that every business owner should take advantage of.

Google Webmaster Tools

You should also add your website to Google Webmaster Tools. This is the primary way that Google communicates with website owners to let them know if there are any issues with your website.

You should check it periodically for any crawl errors. If you have hired a SEO company to do some link building for you, you might also want to check the links they created here, just in case you run the risk of getting slapped by Google’s Penguin penalty.

Fast Website

Site speed is not only a minor ranking factor, but it is also important for your users’ experience. With the mobile Internet almost at full swing, you will find your bounce rate climbing over time if people don’t have the patience to wait for your website to finish loading. You can use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to check if you have a speed problem.

Of course, there are many other things you can do to improve your website’s performance in the search engines. However, we hope we went through the bare basics of SEO-friendly web design. Do you think we missed anything out? Let us know in the comments below!

 

About The Author
This article is contributed by Fairuze Shahari. When he’s not furiously downing G&T’s, Fairuze writes for CLOUDROCK, a SEO company with a presence in Singapore and Malaysia.