In a world where everything runs around the Internet, online marketing and social media, you might have come across the term SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimisation.
When first building a website, it is necessary to insert valuable SEO elements into its design. This will enable your site to stand out and appear among the top results of a Google search. When doing a research and typing few keywords in the tool bar, people tend to focus on the first page of results and this is why it is extremely important to implement a strong SEO, in order to always be ahead of competition and ensure a spot on that first Google page. Here are 5 essential SEO guidelines to follow when creating a website:
1) Use a proper URL
When deciding what type of URL you should use, always keep in mind that it should include the name of the topic of your content. A good URL has to be short and able to describe, with just few words, what that page linking to the URL is about. In case you needed to implement multi-word URLs, you should try to avoid confusing ID numbers and choose dashes instead of underscores.
2) Adaptable design
Great SEO ensures a pleasant and easy user experience. This is why a responsive design is crucial to the success of your website, which has to be perfectly accessible from any device. The content presented on your site has to be always readable and look as nice as from the screen of a laptop, of a tablet or smartphone. A wide range of businesses today create mobile versions of their websites, to make sure that, even users visiting it when using a smartphone, can access it and view it properly.
3) Include Social Media
Since nowadays every successful business has a strong online presence built thanks to websites and especially social media, it is fundamental to open accounts on the most popular platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Instagram. Following this important step, you should add the logos on your website directly and practically linking to all your social media platforms.
4) Take care of your images
All images have to be adaptable to different devices and guarantee a simple and fast user experience. For this reason they should always have a size going between 20 and 100kb. It is also recommendable to resize your images to the size you prefer, instead of making them smaller in the source code, since this could negatively affect the page load times. When pages take too much time to load, user experience will be unpleasant and will leave a negative mark on your website.
5) Keyword research
There is a fantastic tool called Google Keyword Planner which conducts extensive research on words and phrases about the topics treated by your website. This will effectively allow you to discover what keywords your target market most often use and type into Google when looking for similar products or services offered by your business. By learning what these keywords are, you can implement them into your website, increasing the number of visitors to your website.
SEO can seem complicated at the beginning for someone who is still inexperienced about this fast growing field but learning will be much easier than expected. An infinite number of tips could be added to this list but those certainly were the most important once. If you have any suggestion or have any additional SEO idea, please drop us a line on 07739126188!
Clarissa Lulli