Top 10 tips on how to make your website more SEO friendly

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You can have the most compelling and thought-provoking website content, but if you have not optimised your content for search engines you will lag behind your competitors and not obtain the website traffic you desire, in order to generate leads and enhance your brand's online presence.

There are two elements of SEO, these include on page optimisation and off page optimisation.

On page optimisation: Makes changes to HTML code, content and structure of a website, making it more accessible for search engines to rank your website higher and making it easier for users to access your site.

Off-page optimisation: Focused on building links to your website and covers activities like social media, digital and web public relations.

• An effective SEO strategy takes the following factors into account:
• A search friendly website structure
• A well-researched list of key phrases and keywords
• Content optimised to target selected key phrases and keywords
• Link popularity

So how does one get started with implementing an effective SEO strategy? Below are top 10 tips on how you can create a SEO friendly website and optimise your website copy for optimal results.

1. Ensure that your website is designed in a user-friendly manner, both for mobile and desktop view. The website mustn’t be too cluttered, it must be clear and concise and the user must be able to easily navigate through the site.
2. Ensure that your websites URL is well structured. This will allow for more efficient navigation and processing. Simplicity is key, URLs should be simple, significant and precise.
3. Have a clear understanding of the pages that you want to optimise more and make them a priority. By utilizing an XML sitemap, you can better define your website’s site structure, this will enable search engines to have a better understanding of your website structure when crawling your website.
4. Create a responsive website design that is suitable and easily accessible for all devices. It is important to ensure that your website design creates a good user experience for all types of devices.
5. Ensure that your anchor text links are descriptive and relevant to the page you are linking to.
6. Thoroughly research your keywords. Select the right keywords that are related to both your product offering and are popular industry keywords. Create compelling content around your selected keywords that will interest and engage your user.
7. Optimise your images. Image optimization is even more important for e-commerce websites. It will help you to obtain more leads, attract more customers and reduces site load time. Your product images will have a higher probability of ranking on Googles SERPs and other search engines.
8. Include social media buttons or/and comment options to encourage your users to share your content, this will not only enhance engagement but will also up your rankings as more external users are sharing links that will drive traffic to your website.
9. A useful technique to make your SEO strategy more effective is to earn inbound links from more popular and influential websites. Inbound links help your website to rank higher on SERPs and generate more web traffic.
10. When researching popular keywords and key phrases take the following into account:

• Select similar industry keywords that are mainly used
• Consider common keywords used with that particular keyword
• Account for common misspellings
• A frequency of keywords in search queries
• Keywords that are sending traffic to your competitor’s websites
• Be aware of how many sites are competing for the same keywords you want to use.

Don’t be too caught up in ranking higher and generating web traffic by focusing on what appeals more to bots and lose the importance of creating a good user experience for your website visitors. A well thought through SEO strategy is a combination of tools and techniques for optimising SEO and creating compelling, engaging and shareable content for your users.